there of speech? We understood.

By-and-by some broken wreaths of smoke floated, outward into the room.
My sense caught the fragrance. I sniffed it with a rush of memories.
Always that smell of smoke, with other wild, clean, pungent odors of
the woods, had been strangely pleasant to me. I remember thinking of
them when a boy as incense perpetually and reverently set free by
nature towards the temple of the skies. They aroused in me even then
the spirit of meditation on the mystery of the world; and later they
became in-wrought with the pursuit and enjoyment of things that had
been the delight of my life for many years. So that coming now, at the
very moment when I was dedicating myself to my hearth-stone and to
domestic life, this smell of wood smoke reached me like a message from
my past. For an instant ungovernable longings surged over me to return
to it. For an instant I did return; and once more I lay drowsing
before my old camp-fires in the autumn woods, with the frosted trees
draping their crimson curtains around me on the walls of space and the
stars flashing thick in the ceiling of my bedchamber. My dog, who had
stretched himself at my feet before the young blaze, inhaled the smoke
also with a full breath of reminiscence, and lay watching me out of the
corner of his eye--I fancied with reproachful constancy. I caught his
look with a sense of guilt, and glanced across at Georgiana.

Her gaze was buried deep in the flames. And how sweet her face was,
how inexpressibly at peace. She had folded the wings of her whole
life, and sat by the hearth as still as a brooding dove. No past laid
its disturbing touch upon her shoulder. Instead, I could see that if
there were any flight of her mind away from the present it was into the
future--a slow, tranquil flight across the years, with all the
happiness that they must bring. As I set my own thoughts to journey
after hers, suddenly the scene in the room changed, and I beheld
Georgiana as an old, old lady, with locks of silver on her temples,
spectacles, a tiny sock stuck through with needles on her knee, and her
face finely wrinkled, but still blooming with unconquerable gayety and
youth.

"How sweet that smoke is, Georgiana," I said, rousing us both, and
feeling sure that she will understand me in whatsoever figure I may
speak. "And how much we are wasting when we change this old oak back
into his elements--smoke and light, heat and ashes. What a magnific