CHAPTER VI.
Some days after this Susannah sat alone at the window of the family room, the long white seam on which she was at work enveloping her knees.
Far off on the horizon the cumulous clouds lay with level under-ridges, their upper outlines softly heaped in pearly lights and shades of dun and gray.

Beneath them the hilly line of the forest was broken distinctly against the cloud by the spikes of giant pines.

That far outline was blue, not the turquoise blue of the sky above the clouds, but the blue that we see on cabbage leaves, or such blue as the moonlight makes when it falls through a frosted pane--steel blue, so full of light as to be luminous in itself.

From this the nearer contour of the forest emerged, painted in green, with patches and streaks of russet; the nearer groves were beginning to change colour, and, vivid in the sunlight, the fields were yellow.

From the top of a low hill which met the sky came the white road winding over rise and hollow till it passed the door.