He stole along and looked in. There was Edith, seated, her head bowed on her hands, at the piano. In an instant, before she could turn to the sound of his quick footsteps, he was at her side, kneeling, his head bowed in the folds of her dress. “Edith! I've been such a fool!” She turned, slid from her seat, and was kneeling also, with her arms thrown about his neck. “Oh, Jack! You've come. Thank God! Thank God!” And presently they stood, and his arms were still around her, and she was looking up into his face, with her hands on his shoulders, and saying “You've come to stay.” “Yes, dear, forever.” XXIV The whole landscape was golden, the sea was silver, on that October morning. It was the brilliant decline of the year. Edith stood with Jack on the veranda. He had his grip-sack in hand and was equipped for town. Both were silent in the entrancing scene. The birds, twittering in the fruit-trees and over the vines, had the air of an orchestra, the concerts of the season over, gathering their instruments and about to depart. One could detect in the lapse of the waves along the shore the note of weariness preceding the change into the fretfulness and the tumult of tempests. In the soft ripening of the season there was peace and hope, but it was the hope of another day. The curtain was falling on this. Was life beginning, then, or ending? If life only could change and renew itself like the seasons, with the perpetually recurring springs! But youth comes only once, and thereafter the man gathers the fruit of it, sweet or bitter. Jack was not given to moralizing, but perhaps a subtle suggestion of this came to him in the thought that an enterprise, a new enterprise, might have seemed easier in May, when the forces of nature were with him, than in October. There was something, at least, that fell in with his mood, a mood of acquiescence in failure, in this closing season of the year, when he stood empty-handed in the harvest-time. “Edith,” he said, as they paced down the walk which was flaming with scarlet and crimson borders, and turned to look at the peaceful brown house, “I hate to go.” “But you are not going,” said Edith, brightly. “I feel all the time as if you were just coming back. Jack, do you know,” and she put her hand on his shoulder, “this is the sweetest home in the world now!” “It is the only one, dear;” and Jack made the statement with a humorous sense of its truth. “Well, there's the train, and I'm off with the other clerks.” “Clerk, indeed!” cried Edith, putting up her face to his; “you are going to be a Merchant Prince, Jack, that is what you are going to be.”