is self-arched and unfettered neck;
secure in this loneliness she found herself even talking to him with
barbaric freedom. As she went on, the vague hush of all things animate
and inanimate around her seemed to thicken, until she unconsciously
halted before a dim and pillared wood, and a vast and heathless opening
on whose mute brown lips Nature seemed to have laid the finger of
silence. She forgot the party she had left, she forgot the luncheon she
was going to; more important still she forgot that she had already left
the traveled track far behind her, and, tremulous with anticipation,
rode timidly into that arch of shadow.

As her horse's hoofs fell noiselessly on the elastic moss-carpeted aisle
she forgot even more than that. She forgot the artificial stimulus and
excitement of the life she had been leading so long; she forgot the
small meannesses and smaller worries of her well-to-do experiences; she
forgot herself,--rather she regained a self she had long forgotten.
For in the sweet seclusion of this half darkened sanctuary the clinging
fripperies of her past slipped from her as a tawdry garment. The
petted, spoiled, and vapidly precocious girlhood which had merged into
a womanhood of aimless triumphs and meaner ambitions; the worldly but
miserable triumph of a marriage that had left her delicacy abused and
her heart sick and unsatisfied; the wifehood without home, seclusion,
or maternity; the widowhood that at last brought relief, but with it the
consciousness of hopelessly wasted youth,--all this seemed to drop from
her here as lightly as the winged needles or noiseless withered spray
from the dim gray vault above her head. In the sovereign balm of that
woodland breath her better spirit was restored; somewhere in these
wholesome shades seemed to still lurk what should have been her innocent
and nymph-like youth, and to come out once more and greet her. Old songs
she had forgotten, or whose music had failed in the discords of her
frivolous life, sang themselves to her again in that sweet, grave
silence; girlish dreams that she had foolishly been ashamed of, or had
put away with her childish toys, stole back to her once more and became
real in this tender twilight; old fancies, old fragments of verse and
childish lore, grew palpable and moved faintly before her. The boyish
prince who should have come was there; the babe that should have been
hers was there!--she stopped suddenly with flaming eyes and indignant
col