That excitement had paled now beside the vividness of the dream, as well as the greater interest of the new position. She looked at the parcel with indifference, almost with dislike ... certainly with impatience, as at a thing come at the wrong time. She would open it later on, she said to herself, as she laid it down, and returned with a lightened heart to her measuring of the dresser. Passing from that to other even more entrancing speculations, she was soon wrapped again in the atmosphere which Dick and the packet between them had temporarily dispelled. She forgot them both as she toiled and planned, stopping every now and then to remember Kirkby’s dinner. Strung up though she was, and therefore sensitive to the least touch of trouble, she was still too high on the wave of success to be disheartened for long together. Even when she had begun her absurd game with the furniture, that childish but charming pretence in the midst of which Machell had come upon her, she had not remembered the photograph. Moving again in the dream, she was able to turn even blocks of wood into the dear ones who had peopled it, so that they could scarcely have been more real to her if they had been present in the flesh. The little stool in her arms had held the warmth of a living child; the grandfather’s clock had been more surely Ellen than the packet she had put away. The sight of Machell smiling in at the door had no power to disillusion her. Machell did not annoy her, as Dick had done, by over-cocksure assertions that it was now too late to change. On the contrary, he was full of encouragement and congratulation, and anxious to know her plans. You would almost have thought, she said to herself, chuckling, that he was as glad of the move to Canada as she was herself! Her spirits mounted still further as the sun mounted, and the day grew in clarity and beauty. Like all country-bred folk, she was susceptible to the influence of the weather, even when she was not consciously aware of it. Even when she was most withdrawn in mind from the atmosphere around her, she was still swayed by its many changes. The coming-out of the sun was a trumpet-call to her vitality, even if the note that it sounded was one of clamorous rebellion. A grey day had the power to chill her passion almost to fainting, even if neither it nor any other-coloured day was able to slay it altogether.