to open
the window, and when the fresh morning air came blowing in upon her
Therese leaned back in her seat with a sigh of content.

There was a full day's journey before her. She would not reach
Place-du-Bois before dark, but she did not shrink from those hours
that were to be passed alone. She rather welcomed the quiet of them
after a visit to New Orleans full of pleasant disturbances. She was
eager to be home again. She loved Place-du-Bois with a love that was
real; that had grown deep since it was the one place in the world
which she could connect with the presence of David Hosmer. She had
often wondered--indeed was wondering now--if the memory of those
happenings to which he belonged would ever grow strange and far away
to her. It was a trick of memory with which she indulged herself on
occasion, this one of retrospection. Beginning with that June day when
she had sat in the hall and watched the course of a white sunshade
over the tops of the bending corn.

Such idle thoughts they were with their mingling of bitter and
sweet--leading nowhere. But she clung to them and held to them as if
to a refuge which she might again and again return to.

The picture of that one terrible day of Fanny's death, stood out in
sharp prominent lines; a touch of the old agony always coming back as
she remembered how she had believed Hosmer dead too--lying so pale and
bleeding before her. Then the parting which had held not so much of
sorrow as of awe and bewilderment in it: when sick, wounded and broken
he had gone away at once with the dead body of his wife; when the two
had clasped hands without words that dared be uttered.

But that was a year ago. And Therese thought many things might come
about in a year. Anyhow, might not such length of time be hoped to rub
the edge off a pain that was not by its nature lasting?

That time of acute trouble seemed to have thrown Hosmer back upon his
old diffidence. The letter he wrote her after a painful illness which
prostrated him on his arrival in St. Louis, was stiff and formal, as
men's letters are apt to be, though it had breathed an untold story of
loyalty which she had felt at the time, and still cherished. Other
letters--a few--had gone back and forth between them, till Hosmer had
gone away to the sea-shore with Melicent, to recuperate, and June
coming, Therese had sailed from New Orleans for Paris, whither she had
passed six months.

Things had not gone well at Place-du-Bois duri