After mid-day meal, she ensconced herself in a steamer chair on the piazza facing the mountain; but her book lay face downward.  It was a book on coniferous trees.  She had thought the Valley monotonous when she had first come back.  Now she knew it never remained the same for two whole hours.  The dazzling white of morning had given place to the yellow glow of afternoon.  The River that had flowed quicksilver now swept seaward pure amber rilled with gold.  The fleece clouds herded by wandering winds had massed to towering cumulus where the sheet lightnings played; and the Mountain where the silver snow-cross had glistened in the morning seemed to have changed perspective, to have retreated and withdrawn to a weird upper world.  You no longer saw the wind-blown cataracts.  Purpling shadows, palpable sabling mournful ghost-forms, folded and wrapped the Ridge with here and there shafts of slant light, yellow as bars of gold.  You could no longer hear the rampant roar of streams disimprisoned from snow by mid-day sun.  With the slant light came the sibilant hush, the quiet tangible.

She reclined very still in the steamer chair.  Life and love and mystery wrapped her round, the great reverie of the race, the ecstasy of devotees that sent to death and crusade in the Middle Ages, the lovelight of life brooding warm and radiant.  She no longer saw the shining pageant of sunlight on the argent fields of an infinite universe; the sparks and spangles of light in silver cataracts; a world veiled in gold mist, flame-fired of joy, little cressets of rose edging every sky-line.  She was possessed, obsessed, bathed, enveloped in a flame of new life.  If she thought at all, ’twas in the symbol of the old Apostle, “in Him we live and move and have our being.”  She recalled that God had been defined in the consciousness of the race as Love.  Deep draughts of new existence whelmed her.  No longer life coursed somnolent through unconscious veins.  Life ran riotous of gladness tingling to a living joy so poignant it became pain.  Was it fool-joy born of swifter pulse and time-old inheritance in the flesh?  Was it the rhapsody of self-hypnotism, which ancients would have called vision?  Of such dreams does creation spring full born and enfleshed.  Of such dreams does heroism laugh at death.  Of such dreams does life invest the daily round with rain-bow mist, with the spectrum gamut of all the colors that blend to the pure white light of daily life.  As a lense splits up light, so love had brought out the hidden colors of existence, of eternity; as she dreamed, eternity itself seemed short.

Then came the restlessness that had shaken Wayland on the Ridge the night before, the fire that tests the vessel; and whether the life go to pieces depend on whether the vessel be both strong and clean.  Yet she was not afraid.  She remembered their talk the night before of the snow flake falling to the same law as the avalanche; and was she not also a part of the Great Law?