A space of time six weeks in duration may be hastily dismissed as producing no alteration in Joan's method of thought and life. It swept her swiftly through shortening days and the last of the summer weather to the climax of her fortunes. As the season waned she kept nearer home, going not much further than Tremathick Cross on the St. Just road or to that relic already mentioned as lying outside Sancreed churchyard. These, in time, she associated as much with her child as with herself. The baby had now taken its natural place in her mind, and she prayed every day that it might presently forgive her for bringing it into the world at all. Misty-eyed, not unhappy, with her beauty still a startling fact, Joan mused away long hours at the feet of her granite friends through the waning splendors of many an autumn noon. Then, within the brief space of two weeks, a period of weather almost unexampled in the memory of the oldest agriculturists drew to its close. That mighty rains must surely come all knew, but none foretold their tremendous volume or foresaw the havoc, ruin and destruction to follow upon their outpouring. Meantime, with late September, the leaves began to hustle early to earth under great winds. Rain fell at times, but not heavily at first, and a thirsty world drank open-mouthed through deep sun-cracks in field and moor and dried-up marsh. But bedraggled autumn's robes were soon washed colorless; the heath turned pallid before it faded to sere brown; rotten banks of decaying leaves rose high under the hedges. There was no dry, crisp whirl of gold on the wind, but a sodden condition gradually overspread the land. The earth grew drunken with the later rains and could hold no more. October saw the last of the purple and crimson, the tawny browns and royal yellows. Only beeches, their wet leaves by many shades a darker auburn than is customary, still retained lower foliage. The trees put on their winter shapes unduly early. The world was dark and sweated fungus. Uncouth children of the earth, whose hour is that which sees the leaf fall, sprang into short-lived being. Black goblins and gray, white goblins and brown, spread weird life abroad. With fleshy gills, squat and lean, fat and thin, bursting through the grass in companies and circles, lurking livid, gigantic and alone on the trunks of forest trees, gemming the rotten bough with crimson, twinkling like topaz on the crooked stems of the furze, battening upon death, rising into transitory vigor from the rack and rot of a festering earth, they flourished. Heavy mists now stretched their draperies over the high lands; and exhalations from the corpse of the summer hung bluish under the rain in the valleys. One night a full moon shone clearly, and through the ambient light ominous sheets and splashes of silver glimmered in the low fields. Here they had slowly and silently spread into existence, their birth hidden under the mists, their significance marked by none but anxious farmers.