Within a very short time she announced the meal with pretty grace, which concealed all trace of nervousness, save for the heightened color of her cheeks, which, he noted, were as scarlet as though she herself had been bending over a hot stove. She led the way into an exquisite little dining room, which he at once took to be the expression of her own taste. It was in white and apple green, with a large trellised window opening upon the lawn. A small table had been placed in the sun near the window, and was covered with dazzling white linen, polished silver, and cut glass, which, catching the morning beams, reflected a prismatic riot of colors. The chops, lettuce, bread and butter, and coffee were already served. As he seated her, he felt as though he were living out a dream--one of the dreams that as a very young man he had sometimes dreamed when, lying flat upon his back in the sun, he had watched the big cotton clouds wafted, like thistledown, across the blue. It might have been Italy for the blue of the sky and the caressing warmth of the sun. They threw open the big window and in flooded the perfume of lilacs and the twitter of sparrows, which is the nearest to a bird song one can expect in New York. But after all, this was n't New York; nor Spain; nor even the inner woods; it was just Here. And Here is where the eyes of a man and a woman meet with spring in their blood. Griefs of loss, bitter, poignant; sorrows of mistakes, bruising, numbing; the ache of disappointments, ingratitudes, betrayals,--Nature surging on to her fulfillment sweeps them away, like fences before a flood, allowing no obstructions to Youth's kinship with Spring. So the young may not mourn long; so, if they do, they become no longer young. The man and the woman might have been two care-free children for all they were able to resist the magic of this fair morning or the subtler magic of their own emotions. To the man it suggested more than to the woman because he gave more thought to it, but the woman absorbed more the spirit of it because she more fully surrendered herself. Donaldson found himself with a good appetite. There was nothing neurotic about him. He was fundamentally normal--fundamentally wholesome--with no trace of mawkishness in his nature. As he sipped the hot golden-brown coffee, he tried to get at just what it was that he felt when he now looked at her. It came to him suddenly and he spoke it aloud, "I seem to have, this minute, a fresher vision of life than I have known since I was twenty." It was something different from anything he had experienced up to now. It was saner, clearer. "It is the morning," she hazarded. "I never saw the grass so green as it is this morning; I never felt the sun so warm." "It is like the peace of the inner woods,--only brighter," he declared. "You said such peace never came to any one unless alone." "Did I?" She nodded.