"Sun-dial," noting the titles--Sunrise, Morning, High Noon, Afternoon,
Evening, Night. "'Youth and Crabbed Age' is Evening, I see," she
commented. "Then what is this?" She held up a separate sheet loosely
set in the book, reading the title, "Too Late for Love and Loving."

"That was an attempt with words of my own before I resigned in favor
of Shakespeare," Mark explained. "I am not a poet. They are just words
for music."

She read them over:

"Sweet love, too late!
Life is Time's prisoner,
Love's hour has fled,
The flowers are dead,
Love has passed by.
Sweet love, too late!
Death stands at the gate."

She sat down again without comment, and ran it through softly, then
again more assuredly, with appreciation. The warm afternoon light from
the open window fell upon her, revealing what the years had worn, what
they had been powerless to touch. Her hair was half gray; but her eyes
were as dark, vivid, and expectant as the eyes of youth--autumn pools
shot through with the sun. The mouth was a generous one, finely molded
by the experience of the years. He remembered that she was a spinster,
yet there was about her none of the emptiness, the starved quality, of
the woman with her destiny unfulfilled; nothing of the futility, the
incompletion, of the celibate that causes the imagination to turn with
relief to contemplation of the most bovine mother of a family. It must
have been an impervious boor indeed who would venture to jest upon Miss
Allison's single state. It spoke of naught but dignity. Life, it would
seem, had not deprived her.

It was that warm, alive, expectant quality, Mark reflected, that
revealed that Allison Clyde was neither wife nor mother. She had
turned, no doubt, to other interests with her unquenchable vividness,
and so could still look out upon the world with young, hopeful eyes.

Yet what, at her age, could the years still bring her? It had been
surely a vain waiting; yet, viewed as a picture, it had, he felt, an
autumnal beauty of its own.

That night Miss Allison Clyde wrote a long letter to her lifelong
friend, Miss Augusta Penfield:

I met Lucretia's nephew, Mary's boy, to-day. He is you know, a
composer already on the road to fame. You remember that he was born
abroad. There is for all his undiluted American ancestry a foreign
touch about him, a something warm and ardent caught under the Italian
skies that even our children seem to take on when born there. He