CHAPTER XXVI

Late September had come, with its sad, too-mellow beauty. It had ripened all the fruit, burnishing the apples to look like little suns, and the sun to look like a ripe, burnished apple. It had woven its web of blue over all the still countryside, so that the elms standing so nobly in the Sussex meadows seemed draped in it, like tapestry trees; the far hills had wrapped themselves in its hazy folds and gone to sleep until some cold and later wind should strip them of it.

In Madame Claire's garden a few roses bloomed somewhat blowsily, and asters and Michaelmas daisies, dahlias and a brave company of late-staying perennials made welcome color notes among the greens and rust browns.

She sat in her library, writing. Every now and then she looked out of her French window at Stephen who was sitting on the lawn in one of the garden chairs, reading, his long legs resting on another. Robins visited him, perching on a chair or table, and he thought as his sunken blue eyes regarded them humorously, that the robin was more like a confiding little animal than a bird, with its friendly ways, and its power--shared with no other small bird--of meeting the human eye.

He had lived in some of the beauty spots of the world, but he said to himself that no beauty crept into the heart as this beauty of Sussex