ken the path by which the clergyman had
brought him from the station weeks ago on the day of his first arrival.
With a confused memory, as of a dream, he recognized it. The ground was
slippery with dead leaves whose odor penetrated sharply the air of night.
Everywhere about him, as they paused from time to time in the little open
spaces, the trees pressed up thickly; and ever from the valley they had
just left the increasing tide of sound came pouring up after them like
the roar of the sea escaping through doors upon the surface of the world.

And even now the marvelous, enticing wonder of it caught him more than
once and made him hesitate. The sense of what he was giving up sickened
him with a great sudden yearning of regret. The mightiness of that loved
leader, lonely and unafraid, trafficking with the principalities and
powers of sound, and reckoning without misgiving upon the cooperation of
his other "notes"--this plucked fearfully at his heartstrings. But only
in great tearing gusts, so to speak, which passed the instant he realized
the little breathless, grey-eyed girl at his side, charged with her
beautiful love for him and the wholesome ambition for human things.

"Oh! but the heaven we're losing...!" he cried once aloud,
unable to contain himself. "Oh, Miriam ... and I have proved
unworthy ... small...!"

"Small enough to stay with me forever and ever ... here on the earth,"
she replied passionately, seizing his hand and drawing him further up the
hill. Then she stopped suddenly and gathered a handful of dead leaves,
moss, twigs and earth. The exquisite familiar perfume as she held it to
his face pierced through him with a singular power of conviction.

"We should lose _this_," she exclaimed; "there's none of this ... in
heaven! The earth, the earth, the dear, beautiful earth, with you ... and
Winky ... is what I want!"

And when he stopped her outburst with a kiss, fully understanding the
profound truth she so quaintly expressed, he smelt the trees and
mountains in her hair, and her fragrance was mingled there with the
fragrance of that old earth on which they stood.

VII

The rising flood of sound sent them charging ahead the same minute, for
it seemed upon them with a rush; and it was only after much stumbling and
floundering among trees and boulders that they emerged into the open
space of the hills beyond the woods. Actually, perhaps, they had been
running for twenty minutes, but to them it seemed