With a cry she started to her feet. Maddened, she began to heap some articles into a dressing-bag. She was turning from her bureau to the bag when John Smith's letter, which she had not yet read, caught her eye. It was propped against the frame of the mirror. She put out a hand. With his closely-written pages which she passed over, there was a little yellow note directed to her mother in a feeble scrawl. Leaning against the embrasure of the window, Rachel unfolded the note almost against her will. But the more she endeavoured to fix her attention upon it, the more confused she became. "My dear Lavina: I ought not to have left you--" She stared at the words, which trailed off into an illegible run of characters; and the note with its message for another heart, stilled now these twenty years, slipped from her fingers. Outside the sunlight danced on the multitudinous leaves and shimmered on the gravel path. Except for the sound of the sea all was silence. A passing breeze fluttered the paper at her feet and the room was filled with the subtle exhalation of that old regret. She was on her knees. She still saw Emil, heard his voice; and as if grasping something, she opened her arms and carried them back against her heart while her whole frame trembled. Then the miracle held her spell-bound: _She had been saved from the irretrievable step; she had been plucked back from the rock's edge_. Slowly, slowly the dry heart-flames subsided. As mists rose from the ground in summer after the heat and fever of the day, so something pure as childhood, sweet as the aspirations of early youth, rose from the depths of her soul. All the treachery, all the longing of purely selfish love was annihilated. It was one of those crises when the heart sets wide its doors; when the emotion that was personal becomes universal. The shrubbery was alive with insects, murmuring gently; and amid the foliage of the trees, the birds were preparing to go to roost. They had reached those wistful days in late summer, which by the sea fade away in evenings of gold and rose, which fade away into the sea itself. A little wind set all the leaves astir. As she looked toward the sea, a wonderful serenity seemed to fall upon her from that radiant sunset sky, seemed to light on her like a benediction from the dying day.