s waning.

She noted that here, as everywhere else in this northern land of
exquisite, fleeting summers, the sunset colors came on gradually,
increasing in richness of tone and fading through several hours. The
mist of the afternoon had scattered before a faint sea-wind, and
settled wraithlike in the hollows of the hills across the bay. Violet
now in the gloaming it melted into the lilac shadows at the base of the
range that needled the sunset sky.

There was something like promise in the wild beauty of the
evening-time; something in the clean night-scent of the sea and the
grass and the trampled beach-weed that awakened in Jean a sense of
expectancy. She breathed deeply, conscious of a keen delight in doing
so. As she waited, the rose and amber tints died on the white peaks at
the head of the valley, . . . the flaming orange behind them turned
from clear gold to vermilion, . . . from rose madder to an unearthly
red that glowed behind a veil of amethyst while the twilight deepened.
. . .

Suddenly she caught her breath. Out of the powdery, purple gloom
across the bay floated a long line--the funeral canoes. In the blurred
distance they took shape one by one, the paddles dipping in solemn
rhythm. . . . Nearer they came, . . . and nearer. Then over the
darkening water drifted the plaintive rise and fall of the funeral
lament, faint and eerie as voices from the spirit land.

Jean, thinking to linger but a moment before returning to the store,
was spellbound by the mystery and loneliness of the scene. All at
once, as she watched, a line of silent, blanketed figures from
somewhere behind, began to slip down past her hiding place. Looming
weird and tall in the dusk they halted at the water's edge. Softly,
almost imperceptibly these waiting ones took up the mournful plaint,
sending it floating out thin and high in answer to the approaching
bearers of the dead.

While she listened awe and wonder began to give way to something that
tantalized her with a fleeting familiarity--a near understanding.
Long-lost memories of primeval things that eluded her when she strove
to vision them mocked her with an indefinable yearning to pierce the
ages of oblivion that separated her from other nights, other scenes,
other chants like these. . . . She longed for her violin. If she
could but feel the loved instrument beneath her chin, her fingers
drawing from its vibrant lower strings the mystery-music to supplement
the weird