Late that evening Miss Bogart heard the phonograph circling forth the "heart bowed down with weight of woe."... She turned another page in the "pleasant" book. "My poor brother," said Miss Aurelia to herself; "he seems to turn naturally to the--er--melancholy--but I should think," the lady thought sleepily, "that now that Colter isn't Colter at all, but the celebrated scientist Dr. Ledyard, that he, she, they----" CHAPTER XXVII THE JUDGE IS IMPRESSED It was late September; the yellow maples threw gold on sky and ground; oaks and hickories were mantled in ruddy purples. Along the banks of the river the solemn procession of outgoing summer was begun; on dry nights mountain fires spread crackling smoky fringes. The Westchester hills, the hills of Pocantico, were trailed in grape-colored mists; bloom was on the Ramapos; amethystine smokes along the Highlands and the Palisades. There was drowse and arrest in the air, a kind of heat that was different from summer, more dazing, more intensely keyed, with greater power to make one restless. Sard, lying on her couch in the tower-room, felt as if a world was closing in on her, as if the sky pressed and the hills leaned to smother. She had been reading to Dunstan, for the first time sitting up in his wheeled chair, had seen him drift off to sleep, and had then put down her book with an unconquerable sense of listlessness, of lack of purpose that had somehow closed in on her. The girl, her body and mind built for action, for creative and progressive things, found herself victimized by a slowly narrowing circle of life, static, unimaginative, unprogressive; she was the fiery center of a wooden wheel of existence that revolved in accustomed sameness with no effort, to no purpose. "When Dunstan gets well," thought Sard desperately, "when Dunstan doesn't need me, what shall I do then? Aunt Aurelia doesn't really need me, Father will have nothing to do with me unless I--just--just capitulate. And I can't do that. What shall I do?" The girl's mind, shrinking from her father's idea of her, went over the situation; the only way to clear up that situation was to say she had been mistaken in Colter, that she proudly told herself she could never do. But supposing Colter never came back, never--came--back to Willow Roads? Life would go on the same and, of course, one could adapt one's self to anything; with a shiver the girl tried to think what this adaptation would mean.