There were winter nights, in front of her sinking fire, when she would live over the romantic folly and the thwarted aims of her youth. Then, through what appeared to be an endless vista, she would survey the irreconcilable difference between character and conduct. In her own life she could trace no logical connection between being and behaviour, between the thing that she was in herself and the things she had done. She thought of herself as a good woman (there were few better ones, she would have said honestly) yet in her girlhood she had been betrayed by love and saved by the simplest accident from murder. Surely these were both flagrant transgressions according to every code of morality! They were acts, she knew, which she would have condemned in another; but in her memory they appeared as inevitable as the rest of her conduct, and she could not unravel them from the frayed warp-and-woof of the past. And she saw now that the strong impulses which had once wrecked her happiness were the forces that had enabled her to rebuild her life out of the ruins. The reckless courage that had started her on the dubious enterprise of her life had hardened at last into the fortitude with which she had triumphed over the unprofitable end Of her adventure. Good and bad, right and wrong, they were all tangled together. "How can I tell," she could ask, "what I should have done if I had not been myself?" VII Riding slowly down the road from Five Oaks to Gooseneck Creek, Dorinda watched the few sheep browsing among the lengthening shadows of the October afternoon. Beyond them the life-everlasting broke in silver waves against the dim blue horizon. Over the whole landscape, with its flat meadows, its low rounded hill in the east, its crawling rust-coloured roads, hung a faint, hazy drift, as inaudible as the dying quiver of insects. Passing at a walk on her white horse against the rich autumn sunset, she reached the log bridge at the creek and kept on toward the fork of the road. She had taken the longer way home in order that she might inspect the new gate which William Fairlamb had finished. Round her, as evanescent as the last flare of day, there was this quivering haze, which was half dreamlike and half the tremor of perishing things. Nature drifting into rest; flowers drifting into dust; grasshoppers drifting into death; faint sunshine drifting into darkness. And in her own mind shadowy images or impressions drifting into thoughts.