The others were in the family-room, which was also dining-room.  In the kitchen beyond, Mrs. Jeffords’ stove was roaring up for an early tea, and she was whipping griddle-cakes together.

“My brother, Mr. Kirkbright—­Miss Argenter.  Miss Desire Ledwith—­Sylvie.”

The two girls shook hands, and looked in each others faces.

“How clear, and strong, and trusty!” Sylvie thought.

“You dear little spirit!” thought Desire, seeing the delicate face, and the brave sweetness through it.

This was the second real introduction Miss Euphrasia had made within ten days.  It was a great deal, of that sort, to happen in such space of time.

“If it hadn’t been for the storm, we might have hurried down and missed you.  Mother was beginning to dread the coming on of the cold,” said Sylvie.  “But the rain came and settled it, for just now.  That rested me.  A real good ‘can’t help’ is such a comfort.”

“The Father’s No.  Shutting us in with its grand, gentle forbiddance.  Many a rain-storm is that.  I always feel so safe when I am shut up by really impossible weather.”

After the tea, they were still in time for the whole sunset, wonderful after the storm.

Desire had gone from the table to the half-glazed door which opened from the room into a broad porch, looking out directly across the hollow, along a valley-line of side-hills, to the distant blue peaks.

“O, come!” she cried back to the others, as she hastened out upon the platform.  “It is marvelous!”

Heavy lines of clouds lay banked together in the west, black with the remnant and recoil of tempest; between these, through rifts and breaks, poured down the sunlight across bright spaces into the bosoms of the hills lighting them up with revelations.  The sloping outlines shone golden green with lingering summer color, and discovered each separate wave and swell of upland.  The searching shafts fell upon every tree and bush and spire, moving slowly over them and illuminating point after point, making each suddenly seem distinct and near.  What had been a mere margin of distant woods, stood eliminated and relieved in bough and stem and leafage, with a singular pre-Raphaelitic individuality.  It was the standing-out of all things in the last radiance; called up, one by one under the flash of judgment—­beautiful, clear, terrible.

Then the clouds themselves, as the sun dropped down, drank in the splendor.  They turned to rose and crimson; they floated, and spread, and broke, and drifted up the valley, against the hills on right and left.  Rags and shreds of them, trailing gorgeous with color, clung where the ridges caught them, and streamed like fragments of heavenly banners.  The sky repeated the October woods,—­the woods the sky,—­in vivid numberless hues.

The sunset rolled up and around the watchers as they gazed.  They were in it; it lay at their very feet, and beside them at either hand.  Below, the sheet of water in the “Clay-Pits,” gleamed like burnished gold.  Here and there, from among the tree-tops, came up the smoke of little cascades, reaching for baptism into the pervading glory.