It is of no use to dispute about the Indian summer. I never found two people who could agree as to the time when it ought to be here, or upon a month and day when it should be decidedly too late to look for it. It keeps coming. After the equinoctial, which begins to be talked about with the first rains of September, and isn't done with till the sun has measured half a dozen degrees of south declination, all the pleasant weather is Indian summer--away on to Christmastide. For my part, I think we get it now and then, little by little, as "the kingdom" comes. That every soft, warm, mellow, hazy, golden day, like each fair, fragrant life, is a part and outcrop of it; though weeks of gale and frost, or ages of cruel worldliness and miserable sin may lie between. It was an Indian summer day, then; and it was in October. Faith and Mr. Armstrong walked over the brook, and round by Pasture Rocks, to the "little chapel," as Faith had called it, since the time, last winter, when she and Glory had met the minister there, in the still, wonderful, pure beauty that enshrined it on that "diamond morning." The elms that stood then, in their icy sheen, about the meadows, like great cataracts of light, were soft with amber drapery, now; translucent in each leaf with the detained sunshine of the summer; and along the borders of the wood walk, scarlet flames of sumach sprang out, vivid, from among the lingering green; and birches trembled with their golden plumes; and bronzed ash boughs, and deep crimsons and maroons and chocolate browns and carbuncle red that crowned the oaks with richer and intenser hues, made up a wealth and massiveness of beauty wherein eye and thought reveled and were sated. Over and about all, the glorious October light, and the dreamy warmth that was like a palpable love. They stood on the crisp moss carpet of the "halfway rock"--the altar crag behind them, with its cherubim that waved illumined wings of tenderer radiance now--and gazed over the broad outspread of marvelous color; and thought of the summer that had come and gone since they had stood there, last, together, and of the beauty that had breathed alike on earth and into life, for them. "Faith, darling! Tell me your thought," said Roger Armstrong. "This was my thought," Faith answered, slowly. "That first sermon you preached to us--that gave me such a hope, then--that comes up to me so, almost as a warning, now! The poor--that were to have the kingdom! And then, those other words--'how hardly shall they who have riches enter in!' And I am _so_ rich! It frightens me." "Entire happiness does make one tremble. Only, if we feel God in it, and stand but the more ready for His work, we may be safe." "His work--yes," Faith answered. "But now he only gives me rest. It seems as if, somehow, I were not worthy of a hard life. As if all things had been made too easy for me. And I had thought, so, of some great and difficult thing to do."