She saw the conviction in his eyes before it came to its verification on his lips. He laughed again, the same harsh laugh as before. "True!" he cried. "Of course it was true, you poor little fool!" The words brought a cry from her, and, clasping her hands before her face, she turned and sank into the chair and put her head down on the desk. Garwood stared at her awhile, then took a step toward her. He drew nearer and bent over her, tried to draw her at last up into his arms. "Emily!" he said. "Don't--it's all--I was--I was--crazy--" Her head shook slowly from side to side. "Go away," she said. "Go away--oh, please go away!" She burst into tears, and relinquishing his hold of her he drew himself up, swayed an instant, steadied himself by the desk, and then said: "All right, then, I'll go." And he left the room and the house, trying to reclaim his dignity with the erectness with which he took his careful steps down from the veranda and to the waiting carriage. Then Emily heard the hack roll away. XI Emily leaned at evening against the casement of the western window in her room upstairs. The rain had ceased, and though the clouds were still as gray and cold as stone, the air was becoming luminous, and from somewhere had received a new inspiration, fresh and pure and light. As she gazed listlessly away across the vacant lots that lay beyond her home, she saw, along the rounded tree tops and the chimneyed roofs that made for her the western sky line, that the blanket of cloud was slowly rolling back upon itself, until at last it revealed a long, thin strip of open sky, clear and blue as some remembered stretch of summer sea. In the middle of this, far over on the west side of the town, the low square tower, built like an Italian belvedere on the Ursuline Sisters' Convent, was silhouetted, and below and all around, the masses of foliage became vivid green in the new light that fell upon them. As all the world about shrank in the shades of the coming night, the clouds deepened to a purple, and in the slow and silent changes that went constantly forward, their edges above were softly tinged with ashes of roses, while below, the reflected green of the trees changed their drab to pink. Then there was traced for her a long, wavy thread of glistening silver, the billowed top of some white cloud floating deep in the illimitable distances behind that opening in the sky. And then suddenly, the sun sinking into this proscenium illumined its infinite and glorious vistas with a flood of golden light.