leaves this world with the conviction that of the thousand sides which the female of man presents to the male of woman, not one reveals the being he desires to know. There is always a deep below a deep; a veil behind a veil, a sphere within a sphere.
“It's most remarkable,” said the puzzled man in this instance.
“What is?” asked the enigma promptly.
To avoid an argument which he could not sustain, Archie switched his on to the weather.
“This day in September; one could well believe that it is still the month of roses.”
“What! With those wilted hedges and falling leaves and reaped fields and golden haystacks, and—and—”
She glanced around for further illustrations in the way of contradiction.
“I can see all those things, dear, and the misplaced day also!”
“Misplaced?”
“July day slipped into September. It comes into the landscape of this autumn month, as does love into the hearts of an elderly couple who feel too late the supreme passion.”
Lucy's eyes swept the prospect, and the spring-like sunshine, revealing all too clearly the wrinkles of aging Nature, assisted her comprehension.
“I understand. Yet youth has its wisdom.”
“And old age its experience. The law of compensation, my dearest. But I don't see,” he added reflectively, “what your remark and my answer have to do with the view,” whereat Lucy declared that his wits wandered.
Within the last five minutes they had emerged from a sunken lane where the hedges were white with dust and dry with heat to a vast open space, apparently at the World's-End. Here the saltings spread raggedly towards the stately stream of the Thames, intersected by dykes and ditches, by earthen ramparts, crooked fences, sod walls, and irregular lines of stunted trees following the water-courses. The marshes were shaggy with reeds and rushes, and brown with coarse, fading herbage, although here and
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