Then the ripple passed and the sunny stillness settled again on her spirit.
She thought of John Benham easily now; and while she stood there a quiet happiness shone in her eyes.

After the storm and stress of twenty years, life in this Indian summer of the emotions was like an enclosed garden of sweetness and bloom.

She had had enough of hunger and rapture and disappointment.

Never again would she take up the old search for perfection, for the starry flower of the heights.

Something that she could worship! So often in the past it had seemed to her that she missed it by the turn of a corner, the stop on the roadside, by the choice of a path that led down into the valley instead of up into the hills.