ces.

Higher up, the lane showed thickening tufts of fern and of the creeping
glossy verdure of shaded slopes; trees began to overhang it, and the
shade deepened to the checkered dusk of a beech-grove. The boles of the
trees stood well apart, with only a light feathering of undergrowth; the
path wound along the edge of the wood, now and then looking out on a
sunlit pasture or on an orchard spangled with fruit.

Lily had no real intimacy with nature, but she had a passion for the
appropriate and could be keenly sensitive to a scene which was the
fitting background of her own sensations. The landscape outspread below
her seemed an enlargement of her present mood, and she found something of
herself in its calmness, its breadth, its long free reaches. On the
nearer slopes the sugar-maples wavered like pyres of light; lower down
was a massing of grey orchards, and here and there the lingering green of
an oak-grove. Two or three red farm-houses dozed under the apple-trees,
and the white wooden spire of a village church showed beyond the shoulder
of the hill; while far below, in a haze of dust, the high-road ran
between the fields.

"Let us sit here," Selden suggested, as they reached an open ledge of
rock above which the beeches rose steeply between mossy boulders.

Lily dropped down on the rock, glowing with her long climb. She sat
quiet, her lips parted by the stress of the ascent, her eyes wandering
peacefully over the broken ranges of the landscape. Selden stretched
himself on the grass at her feet, tilting his hat against the level
sun-rays, and clasping his hands behind his head, which rested against
the side of the rock. He had no wish to make her talk; her
quick-breathing silence seemed a part of the general hush and harmony of
things. In his own mind there was only a lazy sense of pleasure, veiling
the sharp edges of sensation as the September haze veiled the scene at
their feet. But Lily, though her attitude was as calm as his, was
throbbing inwardly with a rush of thoughts. There were in her at the
moment two beings, one drawing deep breaths of freedom and exhilaration,
the other gasping for air in a little black prison-house of fears. But
gradually the captive's gasps grew fainter, or the other paid less heed
to them: the horizon expanded, the air grew stronger, and the free spirit
quivered for flight.

She could not herself have explained the sense of buoyancy which seemed
to lift and swing her above the s