Immediately in front of her, the pear orchard had flowered a little late and scattered its frail bloom on the grass. As the sunlight streamed through the trees, they appeared to float between earth and sky in some ineffable medium, while the petals on the ground shone and quivered with a fugitive loveliness, as if a stir or a breath would dissolve the white fire to dew. Above the orchard, where a twisted path ran up to it, there was the family graveyard, enclosed by a crumbling fence which had once been of white palings, and in the centre of the graveyard the big harp-shaped pine stood out, clear and black, on the low crest of the hill. It was the tallest pine, people said, in the whole of Queen Elizabeth County; its rocky base had protected it in its youth; and later on no one had taken the trouble to uproot it from the primitive graveyard. In spring the boughs were musical with the songs of birds; on stormy days the tree rocked back and forth until Mrs. Oakley imagined, in her bad spells, that she heard the creaking of a gallows; and on hot summer evenings, when the moon rose round and orange-red above the hill, the branches reminded Dorinda of the dark flying shape of a witch. While she sat there she lived over again the incidents of the morning; but the vision in her mind was as different from the actual occurrences as the image of her lover was different from the real Jason Greylock. Nothing had happened to disappoint her. Absolutely nothing. There was no reason why she should have been happy yesterday and miserable to-day; there was no reason except the eternal unreasonableness of love! She had tried to fix her mind on the sermon, which was a little shorter and no duller than usual. Sitting on the hard bench which she called a pew, bending her head over the bare back of the seat in front of her, she had sought to win spiritual peace by driving a bargain with God. "Give me happiness, and I----"