Winthrop had been at Waynewood a week—a week of which one day had been so like the next that Winthrop remembered them all with impartial haziness and content. It was delightful to have nothing more startling to look forward to than a quail-shoot, a dinner at Sunnyside, or a game of whist in town; to have each day as alike in mellowness and sunshine as they were similar in events, pass softly across the garden, from shadow to shadow, the while he watched its passage with tranquilly smiling eyes and inert body from the seat under the magnolia or a chair on the quiet porch.

The past became the flimsiest of ghosts, the future a mere insignificant speck on the far horizon. What mattered it that once his heart had ached? That he was practically penniless? That somewhere[151] men were hurrying and striving for wealth? The sky was hazily blue, the sunlight was wine of gold, the southern breeze was the soothing touch of a soft and fragrant hand that bade him rest and sleep, for there was no yesterday and no morrow, and the taste of lotus was sweet in his mouth. The mornings danced brightly past to the lilt of bird song; the afternoons paced more leisurely, crossing the tangled garden with measured, somnolent tread so quiet that not a leaf stirred, not a bird chirped in the enfolding silence; the evenings grew from purple haze, fragrant with wood-smoke, to blue-black clarity set with a million silver stars whose soft radiance bathed the still world with tender light. Such days and such nights have a spell, and Winthrop was bound.

[151]

And Holly? Fate, although she was still unsuspecting of the fact, had toppled the stone into the stream and the ripples were already widening. Winthrop’s coming had been an event. Holly had her friends, girls of her own age, who came to Waynewood[152] to see her and whom she visited in town, and young men in the early twenties who walked or drove out in the evenings, when their duties in the stores and offices were over, and made very chivalrous and distant love to her in the parlor. But for all that many of the days had been long with only Aunt India, who was not exactly chatty, and the servants to talk to. But now it was different. This charming and delightfully inexplicable Northerner was fair prey. He was never too busy to listen to her; in fact, he was seldom busy at all, unless sitting, sometimes with a closed book in one’s lap, and gazing peacefully into space may be termed being busy. They had quite exciting mornings together very often, exciting, at least, for Holly, when she unburdened herself of a wealth of reflections and conclusions and when he listened with the most 

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