ss of earth, plaintive, sweet, indescribably harmonious. It
came to St. George that this was the way the woods at night would
always sound if, somehow, one were able to hear the sweetness that
poured itself out. Even that familiar sense in the night-woods that
something is about to happen was deliciously present with him; and
though Amory went on quietly enough, St. George swam down that green
way, much as one dreams of floating along a street, above-heads.

The path curved, and went hesitatingly down many terraces. Here,
from the dimness of the marge of the island, they gradually emerged
into the beginnings of the faint light. It was not like entering
upon dawn, or upon the moonlight. It was by no means like going to
meet the lights of a city. It was literally "a light better than
any light that ever shone," and it wrapped them round first like a
veil and then like a mantle. Dimly, as if released from the
censer-smoke of a magician's lamp, boughs and glades, lines and
curves were set free of the dark; and St. George and Amory could see
about them. Yet it did not occur to either to distrust the
phenomenon, or to regard it as unnatural or the fruit of any
unnatural law. It was somehow quite as convincing to them as is his
first sight of electric light to the boy of the countryside, and no
more to be regarded as witchcraft.

St. George was silent. It was as if he were on the threshold of
Far-Away, within the Porch of the Morning of some day divine. The
place was so poignantly like the garden of a picture that one has
seen as a child, and remembered as a place past all speech
beautiful, and yet failed ever to realize in after years, or to make
any one remember, or, save fleetingly in dreams to see once more,
since the picture-book is never, never chanced upon again. Sometimes
he had dreamed of a great sunny plain, with armies marching;
sometimes he had awakened at hearing the chimes, and fancied
sleepily that it was infinite music; sometimes, in the country in
the early morning, he had had an unreasonable, unaccountable moment
of perfect happiness: and now the fugitive element of them all
seemed to have been crystallized and made his own in that floating
walk down the wooded terraces of this unknown world. And yet he
could not have told whether the element was contained in that
beauty, or in his thought of Olivia.

At last they emerged upon a narrow, grassy terrace where white steps
mounted to a wide parapet. Jarvo ran