She was glad to be left alone. The sun had
flooded Lonesome Cove now with a light as rich and yellow as
though it were late afternoon, and she could yet tell every tree
by the different colour of the banner that each yet defiantly
flung into the face of death. The yard fence was festooned with
dewy cobwebs, and every weed in the field was hung with them as
with flashing jewels of exquisitely delicate design: Hale had once
told her that they meant rain. Far away the mountains were
overhung with purple so deep that the very air looked like mist,
and a peace that seemed motherlike in tenderness brooded over the
earth. Peace! Peace--with a man on his way to a scaffold only a
few miles away, and two bodies of men, one led by her father, the
other by the man she loved, ready to fly at each other's throats--
the one to get the condemned man alive, the other to see that he
died. She got up with a groan. She walked into the garden. The
grass was tall, tangled, and withering, and in it dead leaves lay
everywhere, stems up, stems down, in reckless confusion. The
scarlet sage-pods were brown and seeds were dropping from their
tiny gaping mouths.
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