breathlessly; "how they ought to be strengthened and
repaired and all, and I was quite excited about it and wanted to give a
little money towards it, but I wouldn't for anything now, enemy or no
enemy."

"Nor I, either," said Mary Leonard, after she had dismissed the driver
with orders to call for them later in the day. They walked on over the
crisp dry grass, and seated themselves on a bit of the fallen masonry.
The reaches of the placid river lay before them, and the hum of the
alert cricket was in their ears. Now and then a bird flew
surreptitiously from one bush to another, with the stealthy, swift
motion of flight in autumn, so different from the heedless, fluttering,
hither-and-yon vagaries of the spring and early summer. The time for
frivolity is over; the flashes of wings have a purpose now; the
possibility of cold is in the air, and what is to be done must be done
quickly.

"We almost always used to come in summer," said Lucy Eastman, "but I
think it's every bit as pretty in the fall."

"So do I," assented Mary Leonard, as she looked down into a hollow where
the purple asters grew so thick that in the half-dusk of the shadow they
looked like magnified snowflakes powdered thickly on the sward. "And it
hasn't changed an atom," she went on, as her eyes roamed over the
unevenness of this combination of man's and nature's handiwork. "It's
just as quiet and disorderly and upset and peaceful as it was then."

"Yes, look up there;" and Lucy Eastman pointed to the higher ramparts,
on the edge of which the long grass wavered in the wind with the
glancing uncertainty of a conflagration. "The last time I was here I
remember saying that that looked like a fire."

After they had eaten their luncheon, which brought with it echoes of
the laughter which had accompanied the picnic supper eaten in that very
corner years ago, they seated themselves in a sheltered spot to wait. It
really seemed as if the old gray walls retained some of the spirit of
those earlier days, so gentle, so mirth-inspiring was the sunshine that
warmed them.

"I'm so glad we came," said Mary,--they had both said it before,--as the
sunny peace penetrated their very souls.

Four o'clock brought the cab, and they drove down the long hills,
looking back often for a final glimpse of the waving grass and the gray
stones. As they turned a sharp corner and lost sight of the old fort,
Mary Leonard glanced furtively at her companion. Her own eyes for the
se