"That was an attempt with words of my own before I resigned in favor of Shakespeare," Mark explained. "I am not a poet. They are just words for music." She read them over: "Sweet love, too late! Life is Time's prisoner, Love's hour has fled, The flowers are dead, Love has passed by. Sweet love, too late! Death stands at the gate." She sat down again without comment, and ran it through softly, then again more assuredly, with appreciation. The warm afternoon light from the open window fell upon her, revealing what the years had worn, what they had been powerless to touch. Her hair was half gray; but her eyes were as dark, vivid, and expectant as the eyes of youth--autumn pools shot through with the sun. The mouth was a generous one, finely molded by the experience of the years. He remembered that she was a spinster, yet there was about her none of the emptiness, the starved quality, of the woman with her destiny unfulfilled; nothing of the futility, the incompletion, of the celibate that causes the imagination to turn with relief to contemplation of the most bovine mother of a family. It must have been an impervious boor indeed who would venture to jest upon Miss Allison's single state. It spoke of naught but dignity. Life, it would seem, had not deprived her. It was that warm, alive, expectant quality, Mark reflected, that revealed that Allison Clyde was neither wife nor mother. She had turned, no doubt, to other interests with her unquenchable vividness, and so could still look out upon the world with young, hopeful eyes. Yet what, at her age, could the years still bring her? It had been surely a vain waiting; yet, viewed as a picture, it had, he felt, an autumnal beauty of its own. That night Miss Allison Clyde wrote a long letter to her lifelong friend, Miss Augusta Penfield: