not in some degree be due to the happiness of my life with your uncle.  I am, undoubtedly, an exceptionally fortunate woman; and as I look backwards I see that the struggles and trials which we have shared together were really blessings.

“Nevertheless, dear Honora, you are, as your uncle wrote you, our child, and nothing can alter that fact in our hearts.  We can only pray with all our strength that you may find happiness and peace in your new life.  I try to imagine, as I think of you and what has happened to you in the few years since you have left us—­how long they seem!—­I try to imagine some of the temptations that have assailed you in that world of which I know nothing.  If I cannot, it is because God made us different.  I know what you have suffered, and my heart aches for you.

“You say that experience has taught you much that you could not have—­learned in any other way.  I do not doubt it.  You tell me that your new life, just begun, will be a dutiful one.  Let me repeat that it is my anxious prayer that you have not builded upon sand, that regrets may not come.  I cannot say more.  I cannot dissemble.  Perhaps I have already said too much.

“Your loving

“AuntMary.”

An autumn wind was blowing, and Honora gazed out of the window at the steel-blue, ruffled waters of the lake.  Unconsciously she repeated the words to herself: 

“Builded upon sand!”

CHAPTER XIV

CONTAINING PHILOSOPHY FROM MR. GRAINGER

Swiftly came the autumn days, and swiftly went.  A bewildering, ever changing, and glorious panorama presented itself, green hillsides struck first with flaming crimsons and yellows, and later mellowing into a wondrous blending of gentler, tenderer hues; lavender, and wine, and the faintest of rose colours where the bare beeches massed.  Thus the slopes were spread as with priceless carpets for a festival.  Sometimes Honora, watching, beheld from her window the russet dawn on the eastern ridge, and the white mists crouching in strange, ghostly shapes abode the lake and the rushing river:  and she saw these same mists gather again, shivering, at nightfall.  In the afternoon they threaded valleys, silent save for the talk between them and the stirring of the leaves under their horses’ feet.

So the Indian summer passed—­that breathless season when even happiness has its premonitions and its pangs.  The umber fields, all ploughed and harrowed, lay patiently awaiting the coming again of the quickening spring.  Then fell the rain, the first, cold winter rain that shrouded the valley and beat down upon the defenceless, dismantled garden and made pools in the hollows of the stone seat:  that flung itself against Honora’s window as though begrudging her the warmth and comfort within.  Sometimes she listened to it in the night.