from a void?

But when Austen appeared, with Pepper, to drive her home to Fairview, his
presence never failed to revive the fierce faith that it was his destiny
to make the world better, and hers to help him. Wondrous afternoons they
spent together in that stillest and most mysterious of seasons in the
hill country--autumn! Autumn and happiness! Happiness as shameless as the
flaunting scarlet maples on the slopes, defiant of the dying year of the
future, shadowy and unreal as the hills before them in the haze. Once,
after a long silence, she started from a revery with the sudden
consciousness of his look intent upon her, and turned with parted lips
and eyes which smiled at him out of troubled depths.

"Dreaming, Victoria?" he said.

"Yes," she answered simply, and was silent once more. He loved these
silences of hers,--hinting, as they did, of unexplored chambers in an
inexhaustible treasure-house which by some strange stroke of destiny was
his. And yet he felt at times the vague sadness of them, like the sadness
of the autumn, and longed to dispel it.

"It is so wonderful," she went on presently, in a low voice, "it is so
wonderful I sometimes think that it must be like--like this; that it
cannot last. I have been wondering whether we shall be as happy when the
world discovers that you are great."

He shook his head at her slowly, in mild reproof.

"Isn't that borrowing trouble, Victoria?" he said. "I think you need have
no fear of finding the world as discerning as yourself."

She searched his face.

"Will you ever change?" she asked.

"Yes," he said. "No man can stand such flattery as that without
deteriorating, I warn you. I shall become consequential, and pompous, and
altogether insupportable, and then you will leave me and never realize
that it has been all your fault."

Victoria laughed. But there was a little tremor in her voice, and her
eyes still rested on his face.

"But I am serious, Austen," she said. "I sometimes feel that, in the
future, we shall not always have many such days as these. It's selfish,
but I can't help it. There are so many things you will have to do without
me. Don't you ever think of that?"

His eyes grew grave, and he reached out and took her hand in his.

"I think, rather, of the trials life may bring, Victoria," he answered,
"of the hours when judgment halts, when the way is not clear. Do you
remember the last night you came to Jabe Jenney's? I stood in the road
long a