silver warmed into gold, the gold kindled into pure and living fire;
and the face of the East was barred with elemental scarlet. The day drew
its first long breath, steady and chill; and for leagues around the woods
sighed and shivered. And then, at one bound, the sun had floated up; and
her startled eyes received day's first arrow, and quailed under the
buffet. On every side, the shadows leaped from their ambush and fell
prone. The day was come, plain and garish; and up the steep and solitary
eastern heaven, the sun, victorious over his competitors, continued
slowly and royally to mount.

Seraphina drooped for a little, leaning on a pine, the shrill joy of the
woodlands mocking her. The shelter of the night, the thrilling and
joyous changes of the dawn, were over; and now, in the hot eye of the
day, she turned uneasily and looked sighingly about her. Some way off
among the lower woods, a pillar of smoke was mounting and melting in the
gold and blue. There, surely enough, were human folk, the
hearth-surrounders. Man's fingers had laid the twigs; it was man's
breath that had quickened and encouraged the baby flames; and now, as the
fire caught, it would be playing ruddily on the face of its creator. At
the thought, she felt a-cold and little and lost in that great
out-of-doors. The electric shock of the young sun-beams and the unhuman
beauty of the woods began to irk and daunt her. The covert of the house,
the decent privacy of rooms, the swept and regulated fire, all that
denotes or beautifies the home life of man, began to draw her as with
cords. The pillar of smoke was now risen into some stream of moving air;
it began to lean out sideways in a pennon; and thereupon, as though the
change had been a summons, Seraphina plunged once more into the labyrinth
of the wood.

She left day upon the high ground. In the lower groves there still
lingered the blue early twilight and the seizing freshness of the dew.
But here and there, above this field of shadow, the head of a great
outspread pine was already glorious with day; and here and there, through
the breaches of the hills, the sun-beams made a great and luminous entry.
Here Seraphina hastened along forest paths. She had lost sight of the
pilot smoke, which blew another way, and conducted herself in that great
wilderness by the direction of the sun. But presently fresh signs
bespoke the neighbourhood of man; felled trunks, white slivers from the
axe, bundles