The quail-shoot, after the enthusiastic contest of the first day, abated to a sort of desultory skirmish, each sportsman going into the field as best suited his mood. The weather bred a languor, peculiarly Southern and dreamy, which was aided by the quietude and isolation of the place. The bustle and activity with which the sport had begun became irregularly intermittent. Day after day the sky was serene and cloudless, tinted with that cool, bird-egg blue, tender, delicate, transparent, against which the lines of wood came out with a peculiar semi-tropical effect. Nearly all the time there was a breeze, not the rollicking Northern wind that whisks things about, but a fitful breath that palpitated lazily in the tops of the dull old trees and stirred the vines and plants and dry, thin grass in a fashion wholly indefinite and aimless. It was a luxury to idle around in the shadowy nooks and corners of DeKay Place, where the spirit of old times hovered like a vague, fascinating perfume. Life lost its rough angles here, its outlines softening down to harmonize with the monotonous equipoise of its surroundings. The river had the charm of all low-country streams, a warm, slow, lagging motion, a look of lapsing away into some strange, silent, unexplored region; its murmur was a lingering, never quite ended good-by. To Reynolds those were days of deep and sweet excitement into which now and then darted a pang like a stab in the heart. He was with Agnes Ransom a great deal. Shy and strangely limited in conversation as she was, he yet found her monosyllables and simplest phrases quite enough to hold him to her side. She had not read a great deal of art and literature, she had but fragmentary glimpses of knowledge, her round of life had been confined to a small compass: still she seemed to have gathered a great deal, and a depth rather than a width of experience was in some subtle way suggested by her words and looks.