'It's only the last growlings,' she said after a moment. 'Growlings?' I echoed. 'It's only the last growlings and mutterings of a thunderstorm that's going away. Whatever it was that happened to you--you've never told me, you know, but I'm quite good at somehow knowing--was very like a thunderstorm. A violent one. It was rather brief, it raged incredibly, and then it rumbled off. Though you were flattened out while it was going on, like some otherwise promising crop--' 'Oh,' I protested; but I had to laugh. '--still when it took itself off you missed it. I wouldn't talk like this,' she said, turning her sweet eyes to me, 'I wouldn't make fun if I weren't sure you are on the road, anyhow, to being cured. Presently you'll reach the stage when you begin to realise that falling out of love is every bit as agreeable as falling in. It is, you know. It's a wonderful feeling, that gradual restoration to freedom and one's friends.' 'You don't understand after all,' I said. Dolly said she did. 'No. Because you talk of falling out of love. What has happened to me is far worse than that. That? That's nothing. It's what everybody is doing all the time. What has happened to me is that I've lost my faith. It has been like losing God, after years of trust in Him. I believed with all my heart. And I am desolate.' But Dolly only shook her head. 'You're not as desolate as you were,' she said. 'Nobody who loves all this as you do--' and she turned up her face to the warm sun, blinking her eyes,--'can go on being desolate long. Besides--really, you know--look at that.' And she pointed to the shining mountains across the valley's eastern end. Yes. That is eternal. Beauty is eternal. When I look at that, when I am in the clear mood that, looking at the mountains, really _sees_ them, all the rest, the bewilderment and crying out, the clinging and the hankering, seem indeed unworthy. Imagine, with the vast landscape of the splendid world spread out before you, not moving freely in it on and on rejoicing and praising God, but sitting quite still lamenting in one spot, stuck in sediment. 'Did you say sentiment?' asked Dolly. 'Did I say anything?' I asked in surprise, turning my head to her. 'I thought I was thinking.' 'You were doing it aloud, then,' said Dolly. 'Was the word sentiment?' 'No. Sediment.' 'They're the same thing. I hate them both.' _September 24th._ What will happen to Mrs. Barnes and Dolly when I go back to England? The weather was a little fidgety to-day and yesterday, a little troubled, like a creature that stirs fretfully in its sleep, and it set me thinking. For once the change really begins at this time of the year it doesn't stop any more. It goes on through an increasing unpleasantness winds, rain, snow, blizzards--till, after Christmas, the real winter begins, without a cloud, without a stir of the air, its short days flooded with sunshine, its dawns and twilights miracles of colour.