The road was creeping drowsily now between high grass-banks, out through the hills.  A sleepy, quiet road.  The restless dust of the town never had been heard of out there.  It (the road) went wandering lazily through the corn-fields, down by the river, into the very depths of the woods,—­the low October sunshine slanting warmly down it all the way, touching the grass-banks and the corn-fields with patches of russet gold.  Nobody in such a road could be in a hurry.  The quiet was so deep, the free air, the heavy trees, the sunshine, all so full and certain and fixed, one could be sure of finding them the same a hundred years from now.  Nobody ever was in a hurry.  The brown bees came along there, when their work was over, and hummed into the great purple thistles on the roadside in a voluptuous stupor of delight.  The cows sauntered through the clover by the fences, until they wound up by lying down in it and sleeping outright.  The country-people, jogging along to the mill, walked their fat old nags through the stillness and warmth so slowly that even Margaret left them far behind.  As the road went deeper into the hills, the solitude and quiet grew even more penetrating and certain,—­so certain in these grand old mountains that one called them eternal, and, looking up to the peaks fixed in the clear blue, grew surer of a world beyond this where there is neither change nor death.

It was growing late; the evening air grew more motionless and cool; the russet gold of the sunshine mottled only the hill-tops now; in the valleys there was a duskier brown, deepening every moment.  Margaret turned from the road and went down the fields.  One did not wonder, feeling the silence of these hills and broad sweeps of meadow, that this woman, coming down from among them, should be strangely still, with dark questioning eyes dumb to their own secrets.

Looking into her face now, you could be sure of one thing:  that she had left the town, the factory, the dust far away, shaken the thought of them off her brain.  No miles could measure the distance between her home and them.  At a stile across the field an old man sat waiting.  She hurried now, her cheek coloring.  Dr. Knowles could see them going to the house beyond, talking earnestly.  He sat down in the darkening twilight on the stile, and waited half an hour.  He did not care to hear the story of Margaret’s first day at the mill, knowing how her father and mother would writhe under it, soften it as she would.  It was nothing to her, he knew.  So he waited.  After a while he heard the old man’s laugh, like that of a pleased child, and then went in and took her place beside him.  She went out, but came back presently, every grain of dust gone, in her clear dress of pearl gray.  The neutral tint suited her well.  As she stood by the window, listening gravely to them, the homely face and waiting figure came into full relief.  Nature had made this woman in a freak of rare sincerity.  There were no reflected lights