is gold in the light, gold on the foliage, gold on the grass, gold
on all surfaces, gold in all shadows, and a gold sheen in the sky
itself. Red gold like a rich lacquer overlay the trunks of the
occasional pines, and pale-yellow gold, beaten and thin, shimmered along
the pendulous garlands of the American elms, where they caught the sun.
It was a windless morning and a silent one; the sound of a hammer or of
a motorist's horn, coming up from the slope of splendid woodland that
was really the town, accentuated rather than disturbed the immediate
stillness.

To Olivia Guion this quiet ecstasy of nature was uplifting. Its rich,
rejoicing quality restored as by a tonic her habitual confidence in her
ability to carry the strongholds of life with a high and graceful hand.
Difficulties that had been paramount, overpowering, fell all at once
into perspective, becoming heights to be scaled rather than barriers
defying passage. For the first time in the twenty-four hours since the
previous morning's revelations, she thought of her lover as bringing
comfort rather than as creating complications.

Up to this minute he had seemed to withdraw from her, to elude her. As a
matter of fact, though she spoke of him rarely and always with a
purposely prosaic touch, he was so romantic a figure in her dreams that
the approach of the sordid and the ugly had dispelled his image. It was
quite true, as she had said to Drusilla Fane, that from one point of
view she didn't know him very well. She might have said that she didn't
know him at all on any of those planes where rents and the price of beef
are factors. He had come into her life with much the same sort of appeal
as the wandering knight of the days of chivalry made to the damsel in
the family fortress. Up to his appearing she had thought herself too
sophisticated and too old to be caught by this kind of fancy, especially
as it was not the first time she had been exposed to it. In the person
of Rupert Ashley, however, it presented itself with the requisite
limitations and accompaniments. He was neither so young nor so rich nor
of such high rank as to bring a disproportionate element into their
romance, while at the same time he had all the endowments of looks,
birth, and legendary courage that the heroine craves in the hero. When
he was not actually under her eyes, her imagination embodied him most
easily in the _svelte_ elegance of the King Arthur beside Maximilian's
tomb at Innspruck.