“Very well; we will turn back,” she said in a queer voice. She was thinking about this road with no bottom in it beyond the place where so many lovers came to plight their troth. Half an hour later, the disgruntled Buck had taken his mud-spattered car to the garage, and Helen was still standing on the veranda of her house, looking out over her small world. The rain had passed like a silver veil over the hills. The clouds, split by this March wind, were rolling back like huge wagon covers. The grass was beginning to show a misty green on the lawn. Pink petals of peach blossoms, blown from the orchard behind the house, lay in rifts above it. The flowering shrubs, massed on either side of the driveway, were budding. The elm trees were shaking their beards of bloom. The last rays of the setting sun made all the windows of her house flame with golden light. She could not leave this place; this was her house and her world. Every bloom to be was so sweetly foretold to her in this warm air. She could not give it up. There must be something to live for and love. She suffered most from the breaking of this habit of loving. And the shock she had of discovering that she still loved her husband disturbed her more than the possible attitude Shannon might assume toward her. She was that far from suspecting, you understand, the imaginary activities of gossips who are never contented with the bare facts, but must invent explanations of these facts according to their fancies. Well, she decided, she would not go away. She would hold to her original plan for happiness. Surely there must be peace and joy in love you nurtured yourself. Then she turned and paced slowly the length of the veranda. Her step changed to increasing swiftness as she came back from the far end, her face also. She looked as she might have looked if flames enveloped her, and she was flying through the wind, a wildness and horror in her eyes. She dashed into the house, caught sight of the maid in coming up the hall, who halted abruptly at this sudden vision of her mistress. “Charlotte, get my things ready. Pack my trunk. I am leaving on the early morning train,” Helen exclaimed as she brushed past her and disappeared into her room. CHAPTER XIX There is a place called an Inn above a city in the mountains--it was built only a few years ago by a man with a Brobdingnagian imagination--a huge pile of bowlders, tunneled and dragged down from the mountain sides and put together as if the ages had soldered them into a great castle. The walls within are rough and covered with strange scripts, fragments of great lines from great poets, sentences from philosophers and saints. It is not a place for tourists, but for people weary with the strife of living, made obedient to peace and silence by exhaustion.