It was a day to live. By an occasional splash of yellow or red among the green that lined the riverside and clothed the diminutive island in the stream, Summer gave notice that in thirty days Nature must find another tenant; and a taste of chill in the air was Winter’s advance agent looking over the premises and arranging to decorate them in the soberer grays and browns for the coming of his serious and mighty master. The lassitude of the hot days was gone, and life and impulse were in the autumn breeze. There was not a suggestion of melancholy or decay or death in earth, air or sky. It was more as if a strong man was risen from drowsy sleep and stretching his muscles and breathing a fresh air into his lungs for a day of vigorous doing. Not exhaustion but strength, not languor but briskness, not the end but the beginning, was indicated in every breath and aspect of Nature. It was a morning not to doubt but to believe: and Rutledge felt the tightening spring in mind and body and heart, and the bracing influence made his love and his hopes to vibrate and thrill. As with easy strokes he sent the canoe through the water he drank in the fresh beauty of Elise as an invigorating draught. She was so _en rapport_ with the morning and the sunlight and the life as she sat facing and smiling upon him, her cheeks aglow with health and her face alight with the exquisite keenness of joy in living, that she seemed to him the incarnate spirit of the day. The crisp tingle in the air was not without its spell upon Elise. No blood could respond more quickly than hers to Nature’s quickening heart-beats, and it sang in her pulses with unaccustomed sensations that morning. She looked upon Rutledge as he smartly swung the paddle, and was struck with the strength he seemed to possess without the coarse obtrusion of muscle. She accredited the easiness of his movements to the smooth water, in which he had kept the canoe because of his desire to be as little distracted as possible from contemplation of Elise’s charms and graces. The swing of his body and arms was as graceful as if he had learned it from a dancing-master, and there was a touch of daintiness about it which was his only personal trait that Elise had positively designated in her mind as not belonging to her ideal man. She did not object to it on its own account, but surmised it might have its origin in some vague unmanly weakness—and weakness in a man she despised.