The silent house was a kingdom of delight to be rediscovered. She wandered about it, enchanted with the impressions which her solitude gave her leisure to savor and digest. She threw open a window, and was struck with the sweet freshness of the morning air, as though it were a joy new in the history of the world. She looked out on the lawn, with its dew-studded cobwebs, and felt her heart contract with pleasure. When she stepped out on the veranda, the look of the trees, the breath of the light wind across her cheek, the odor of dawn, all the indefinable personality of that early hour was like an enchantment about her. She ran out to her favorite arbor and plucked one of the heavy clusters of purple grapes, finding their cool acidity an exquisite surprise. She raised her face to the sky with wonder. She had never, it seemed to her, seen so pure yet colorful a sky. The horizon was still faintly flushed with the promise of a dawn already fulfilled in the fresh splendor of the sunbeams slanting across the fresh splendor of her own youth. Never again did Lydia see the things she saw that morning. Never again did she have so unquestioningly the happy child's conception of the whole world as magically centered in indulgent kindness about herself. As she looked up the clean, empty street stretching away under the shade of its thrifty young trees, it seemed made only to lead her forward into the life for which she had been so long preparing herself. Endbury, with its shops, its bustle of factories so unmeaning to her, the great bulk of its inexplicable "business," existed only as the theater upon the stage of which she was to play the leading role in the drama of life--she almost consciously thought of it in those terms--which, after some exciting and pleasurable incidents and a few thrilling situations, was to have a happy ending, none the less actual to her mind because lost in so vague a golden shimmer. Her father's house, as familiar to her as her hand, took on a new and rich dignity as the background for the unfolding of that wonderful creature, herself; that unknown, future, grown-up self, which was to be all that everyone who loved her expected, and more than she in her inexperience knew how to expect.