face. [Pg 41] "Look at that colour!" I said, "does it not cry out to you to be painted? Does it not make you remember that spring orchard of yours that everyone praised so, and from which the great Master predicted your future? Would you not like to escape from all this pleasant, tiny bustle, this network of ceaseless demands upon your hands, your heart, your brain, and once again attack a real work?" She looked curiously at me. "A real work?" she repeated. "I mean an enduring work," I explained, "a thing from which you can lift your hand some day and say, 'This is done. To the best of my power it is finished. Let it stand, and judge me by it.'" She nodded her head slowly and I saw that she was not really looking at me,[Pg 42] though she seemed to be, but beyond me, across the splendid orchard piles, into the stacked gold of the corn far afield. [Pg 42] "That's it," she murmured, "that's just what I told her—'an enduring work.' And what was it she said to me? Oh! I am going again—I am partly there now! Don't you see it? Is that the Lower Orchard? Are those the gray gables of the Farm?" Her voice thrilled strangely and her eyes were staring, vague: it was as if she hung between sleep and waking. I looked where she pointed, but it was only an enormous ledge of gray rock, curiously slanted, and I said so, softly. "It is only a rock, broken at the gable angle, dear." Then she faced me, herself perfectly. "Oh, you think so?" she answered me with a smile. The words were strange enough in themselves, but without them her manner[Pg 43] would have taught me that she was going to speak of stranger things yet, and I was not disappointed. [Pg 43] "It was just such a day as this," she began, "and the smell of the apples always takes me back, though never as strongly as now. We were in the orchard ... ah, my dear, you will tell it wonderfully well when I have told you, and many will learn as I have learned, but you can never make them see the Dame as I saw her!" Then she told me the tale of that adventure.
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