Best of all times she liked the late morning and midday, when she could be alone in the sun-heated nook out of doors and give her body to the warmth. She knew it was a primal, sensuous pleasure, but she surrendered to it; turned and bathed writhingly in the sun flood, feeling herself transparent to it. And the pleasure had its reverse side. Autumn came presently in these upper reaches; a less splendid autumn than would set the Eastern woods ablaze with flaunts of gold and scarlet, but an autumn more eloquent of death, the faded yellow of the aspen groves, broken but rarely by some flaming shrub that only emphasized the monotone. This, the unending, lifeless yellow, and the dead green of spruce and hemlock--a false green, she felt, with its tale of ever-living--made a coloring of nice symbolism for her state. Had she felt the need of a death's head at her sun feast, this neutral, denying flatness would have sufficed. The end had come home to her. It was her unseen familiar, voiceless, but ever present, with a look unhurrying but constant. And there were the mountains themselves, things that had once leaped alive and tortured themselves into frenzied furies of striving only to be stricken and left at last in all the broken tossing of their folly. They had tried the fighting death, and it had availed only to fix their last agonies. Their scarred hulks testified to the wisdom of submission. Yet her mind was normal in these sun-warmed hours of musing. She knew that those dead hills with their dying leafage told another tale to the pair of young lives housed with her. To them they were but inspirations to life vital and triumphant; eminences to be scaled in joyous effort, offering to youth's dreaming, half-true clairvoyance, unending reaches to provoke; near enough to seem attainable; far enough to be plausible with promise of delights. Nor did she fail to rejoice in the fervor of this fresh view so unlike her own. She was conscious of its truth to untouched souls like theirs, and she sought to throw them together, urging them to excursions through the hills. She thought of them at first as her pair whom she had set in a garden where the fruit of no tree was forbidden.