Mrs. Anderson was a picture of a Sunday, in a rich lavender silk and a magnificent though old-fashioned lace shawl which floated from her shoulder in a fairy net-work of black roses.  She would never wear plain black like most women of her age.  She was one of the blue-eyed women who looks well in lavender.  Her blue eyes, now looking at her son from under the rich purples and lavenders of the velvet pansies on her bonnet, got an indeterminate color like myrtle blossoms.  A deeper pink also showed on her cheeks because of the color of her gown.

“Mother, you are just such a mixture of color as that lilac-bush,” said her son, irrelevantly, looking from her to a great lilac-bush in the corner of the yard they were passing.  It was tipped with rose on the delicate ends of its blooming racemes, which shaded to blue at the bases.

“Did you see those new people in church to-day?” said she.

“Yes, I think I did,” replied Randolph.  “They sat just in front of the Egglestons, didn’t they?”

“Yes,” said his mother, “they did sit there.  There is quite a large family.  The ladies are all very nice-looking, too, and they all look alike.  If they are going to church, such a family as that, and so well off, they will be quite an acquisition to Banbridge.”

“Yes,” said Randolph.  He spoke absently, and he looked absently at a great wistaria which draped with pendulous purple blooms the veranda of a house which they were just passing.  It arrested his eyes as with a loud chord of color, but his mind did not grasp it at all.  Afterwards he could not have said he had seen it.  As is often the case, while his eyes actually saw one thing, his consciousness saw another.  Great, purple, pendulous flowers filled his bodily vision, and the head and shoulders of a young girl above a church pew his mental outlook.  Had he seen the Carrolls in church—­had he, indeed?  Had he seen anything besides them, or rather besides one of them?  Had he not, the moment she came up the aisle and entered the pew, seen her with a very clutch of vision?  He could not have described one article of her dress, and yet it was complete in his thought.  She had worn a soft silk of a dull-red shade, with a frill of cream lace about the shoulders, and there were pink roses under the brim of her dull-red hat, and under the roses was her face, shaded softly with a great puff of her dark hair.  And her dark eyes under the dark hair had in them the very light of morning dew, which sparkled back both this world and heaven itself into the eyes of the looker, all reflected in tiny crystal spheres.  Suddenly the man gazing across the church had seen in this girl’s face all there was of earth and the overhang of heaven; he had seen the present and the future.  It is through the face of another human being that one gets the furthest reach of human vision, and that furthest reach had now come for the first time to Randolph Anderson.  All at once a quiver ran through his entire consciousness from this