“Wunderbar, nicht wahr?” laughed Von Gerhard. “But really quite simple. I come in on an earlier train than I had expected, chat a moment with sister Norah, inquire after the health of my patient, and am told that she is running away from a horde of blue devils!—quote your charming sister—that have swarmed about her all day. What direction did her flight take? I ask. Sister Norah shrugs her shoulders and presumes that it is the road which shows the reddest and yellowest autumn colors. That road will be your road. So!” “Pooh! How simple! That is the second disappointment you have given me to-day.” “But how is that possible? The first has not had time to happen.” “The first was yourself,” I replied, rudely. “I had been longing for an adventure. And when I saw you ’way up the road, such an unusual figure for our Michigan country roads, I forgot that I was a disappointed old grass widder with a history, and I grew young again, and my heart jumped up into my throat, and I sez to mesilf, sez I: ‘Enter the hero!’ And it was only you.” Von Gerhard stared a moment, a curious look on his face. Then he laughed one of those rare laughs of his, and I joined him because I was strangely young, light, and happy to be alive. “You walk and enjoy walking, yes?” asked Von Gerhard, scanning my face. “Your cheeks they are like—well, as unlike the cheeks of the German girls as Diana’s are unlike a dairy maid’s. And the nerfs? They no longer jump, eh?” “Oh, they jump, but not with weariness. They jump to get into action again. From a life of too much excitement I have gone to the other extreme. I shall be dead of ennui in another six months.” “Ennui?” mused he, “and you are—how is it?—twenty-eight years, yes? H’m!” There was a world of exasperation in the last exclamation. “I am a thousand years old,” it made me exclaim, “a million!” “I will prove to you that you are sixteen,” declared Von Gerhard, calmly. We had come to a fork in the road. At the right the narrower road ran between two rows of great maples that made an arch of golden splendor. The frost had kissed them into a gorgeous radiance. “Sunshine Avenue,” announced Von Gerhard. “It beckons us away from home, and supper and salad dressing and duty, but who knows what we shall find at the end of it!” “Let’s explore,” I suggested. “It is splendidly golden enough to be enchanted.” We entered the yellow canopied pathway.