the
far shadows upon the shore, and a transfiguring radiance to Edith's
face.

[Sidenote: A Rainbow]

Where the marsh swerved aside to wait until the river passed, the
sunlight took a tall, purple-plumed iris, the reflection of the
turquoise sky in a shallow pool, a bit of iridescence from a
dragon-fly's wing, the shimmering green of blown grasses and a gleam of
rising mist to make a fairy-like rainbow that, upon the instant,
disappeared.

"Oh!" said Edith. "Did you see?"

"See what, dearest?"

"The rainbow--just for a moment, over the marsh?"

"No, I didn't. Do you expect me to hunt for rainbows while I may look
into your face?"

The faint colour came to her cheeks, then receded. "Better go on," she
suggested, "if we're to get where we're going before dark."

The oars murmured in the water, then rain dripped from the shining
blades. The strong muscles of his body moved in perfect unison as the
boat swept out into the sunset glow. Deeper and more exquisite with
every passing moment, the light lay lovingly upon the stream, bearing
fairy freight of colour and gold to the living waters that sang and
crooned and dreamed from hills to sea.

"It doesn't seem," she said, "as though it were the last time. With
earth so beautiful, how can people be miserable?"

[Sidenote: A Perfect Spring Day]

"Very easily," he responded. The expression of his face changed ever so
little, and lines appeared around his mouth.

"I remember," Edith went on, "the day my mother died. It was a perfect
day late in the Spring, when everything on earth seemed to exult in the
joy of living. Outside, it was life incarnate, with violets and robins
and apple blossoms and that ineffable sweetness that comes only then.
Inside, she lay asleep, as pale and cold as marble. At first, I couldn't
believe it. I went outside, then in again. One robin came to the tree
outside her window and sang until my heart almost broke with the pain of
it. And every time I've heard a robin since, it all comes back to me."

"Yes," said Alden, quietly, "but all the life outside was made from
death, and the death within had only gone on to life again. You cannot
have one without the other, any more than you can have a light without a
shadow somewhere."

"Nor a shadow," Edith continued, "without knowing that somewhere there
must be light."

They stopped at the cleft between the hills, where they had been the
other day, but this time no one waited, with breaking he