She stole down the deck-like Summit House verandas, one by one, down the weather-mellowed and unpainted steps, and wandered off to the lower point of ledge at the south of that summit plateau. The Connecticut valley was far-flung at her feet, already hazy with dew-fog and twinkling with the first lamps of evening. Hushed, peaceful, lofty, that place was,—serene, like the hour. The western afterglow was dying into lead. The sky—always finer and vaster from a mountain height—seemed a mammoth arch of sapphire porcelain where a low-hung evening star in the clear southwest shared ephemeral honors with a chaste new moon. Madelaine stood for a time with her figure in silhouette against the south, far out on the point of rock, raised in spirit above the world. The night wind, warm and river-moistened, blew up from vistaed lowlands, rippled her accordion skirt and raised pretty havoc with her hair. Her hands were thrust in the pockets of her sweater-coat, a sinuous protection of old-rose silk. She drank deeply of the night wind. She was thankful for the solitude. The world was very beautiful in these first clear hours of early evening. She sank down after a time on the rock, gathering skirts about fragile ankles. She rested an elbow on a knee, a cheek in a shapely hand. And fancy wandered. Faint, disturbing yearnings had throbbed in the girl’s body of late—her hunger for an Unknown Something was gradually changing—assuming a different aspect. There were times when she wanted to love—overwhelmingly—every one and everything in the world. Then she hated the world for its crudities and shrank from the monstrosities which shocked her on every hand. Why did people remark—and keep on remarking—that she was “different”? Wherein was she different? In so far as her school life developed, she played tennis, gave chafing-dish parties, went canoeing and handled the canoe herself, was officer and active worker in most of the school societies. She was versatile without being prodigal. Yet through all her activities ran that same thread of dark-eyed observation,—poise, self-conservation without repression, the intuitive ability to be ever the spectator while also the participant. The other girls frankly “did not know what to make of her.” Yet when they were in difficulty or desired help on matters they were restrained from carrying to their elders, they sought out Madelaine Theddon as straight as a homing bee. Up and down the slope at her left, the mountain cable-cars kept steep and endless shuttling. At her feet the serried lights of Holyoke Highlands brightened. Far to the south the concentration of radiance she knew to be Springfield glowed clearer on the horizon. Yet none of these, nor the stars, nor the fresh new moon, held the attraction of those dots of brave, optimistic twinkle where isolated homes were scattered upon the face of a night-shrouded valley floor. Was that it—the thing that troubled her—the lights of other people’s homes?