But I had fled, running for my life—or was it to save the life of old Sallie that I ran? In the twinkling of an eye the mysterious change had come. Sallie had poked in the back, the old back that she knowed, a contented spinster teacher. A horse whisked about in the shafts and made to go in a direction contrary to the one he was travelling might understand the bewilderment of the woman who fled from Sallie Singleton. I did not. We are strange creatures, blown upon by winds from the Invisible. We dwell forever in a little fenced-about cleared plot of ground that is our daily life and we are frightened if we but glimpse beyond the cleared land. I had looked over the fence, and I had seen a trackless region. In sudden panic I hated placid spinster teachers content to trudge their sober path through all the days allotted to them; in sudden terror age with its hideous potentialities of loneliness fell upon me. Age and old Sallie grown gray and dirtier but always with the Puck-like knowledge of the psychologic moment at which to torture me with the neighbourhood gossip. Age and John, dear, good John on one side of the fireplace winter nights roaring at me the advancement of his rheumatism and I on the other side roaring back the increasing feebleness of my digestion. All day this spectre, this fear of the future, has held me by the throat. All day I have stumbled along in a maze of distorted thought—swept from all moorings of common sense. Now I have come into the night, the big, silent, star-filled night to ask peace of it. Here under the giant pines that stand like sentinels to guard the peace of the old house I sit on the bench. How still and warm and sweet—a white, white August night, for the coming moon lights the sky. Above all nights I have loved these August nights—the clematis dropping from the upper porch airy and diaphanous as a bride’s veil, and there in the border, running parallel with the low, long, rambling, gray, gray old house the white phlox in masses neighbouring with the August lilies. Looking at the lilies I catch my breath in pain. In their faint, sweet breathings they say to me, “We live but for a day. Take warning. Youth flees, dies as we die.” John comes to the hall door and peers out into the dimness of the shadowy pines. “Honey,” he calls, “are you out there? Good-night. I’m turning in.” I call back, “Good-night.”