ss--as the landscape in a dream--by the deepening twilight. An
immense repose pervaded the whole scene. It affected Katherine to a
certain seriousness. Her social excitements and responsibilities, the
undoubted success that had attended her maiden essay as hostess during
the past week, shrank to trivial proportions. Another order of emotion
arose in her. She became sensible of a necessity to take counsel with
herself.

She moved slowly along the terrace; paused in the arcaded garden-hall
at the end of it--the carven stone benches and tables of which showed
somewhat ghostly in the dimness--to put off her bonnet and push back
the lace scarf from her shoulders. An increasing solemnity was upon
her. There were things to think of, things deep and strange. She must
needs place them, make an effort, anyhow, to do so. And, in face of
this necessity, came an instinct to rid herself of all small impeding
conventionalities, even in the matter of dress. For there was in
Katherine that inherent desire of harmony with her surroundings, that
natural sense of fitness, which--given certain technical
aptitudes--goes to make a great dramatic artist. But, since in her
case, such technical aptitudes were either non-existent, or wholly in
abeyance, it followed that, save in nice questions of private honour,
she was quite the least self-conscious and self-critical of human
beings. Now, as she passed out under the archway on to the square lawn
of the troco-ground, bare-headed, in her pale dress, a sweet
seriousness filling all her mind, even as the sweet summer twilight
filled all the valley and veiled the gleaming surface of the Long Water
far below, she felt wholly in sympathy with the aspect and sentiment of
the place. Indeed it appeared to her, just then, that the four months
of her marriage, the five months of her engagement, even the twenty-two
years which made up all the sum of her earthly living, were a prelude
merely to the present hour and to that which lay immediately ahead.

Yet the prelude had, in truth, been a pretty enough piece of music.
Katharine's experience had but few black patches in it as yet.
Furnished with a fair and healthy body, with fine breeding, with a
character in which the pride and grit of her North Country ancestry was
tempered by the poetic instincts and quick wit which came to her with
her mother's Irish blood, Katherine Ormiston started as well furnished
as most to play the great game that all are bound to