Moreover, she loved the roomy, bare house, with its uncurtained windows facing the mountains, and revealing the spectacles of the day and night.  Because of them she had learned to make the most of her sleepless hours.  The slow, majestic procession in the heavens, the hours of tumult when the moon struggled through the troubled sky, the dawns with their swift, wide-spreading clarity, were the finest diversions she ever had known.

She remembered how, in the old days, she and David had patronized the unspeakably puerile musical comedies under the impression that they “rested” them.  Now, she was able to imagine nothing more fatiguing.

They had an early supper, for Karl was leaving for a day or two in Denver and had to be driven ten miles to the station.  He was unusually silent, and Honora was well pleased that he should be so, for, though she had kept herself so busily occupied all the day, she had not been able to rid herself of the feeling that a storm of memories was waiting to burst upon her.  The feeling had grown as the hours of the day went on, and she at once dreaded and longed for the solitude she should have when Karl was gone.  She was relieved to find that the little girls were weary and quite ready for their beds.  She watched Karl drive away, standing at the door for a few moments till she heard his clear voice calling a last good-bye as the station wagon swept around the pinon grove; then she locked the house and went to her own room.  A fire had been laid for her, and she touched a match to the kindling, lighted her lamp, and took up some sewing.  But she found herself too weary to sew, and, moreover, this assailant of recollection was upon her again.

She had once seen the Northern lights when the many-hued glory seemed to be poured from vast, invisible pitchers, till it spread over the floor of heaven and spilled earthward.  Her memories had come upon her like that.

Then she faced the fact she had been trying all day not to recognize.

It was David’s birthday!

She admitted it now, and even had the courage to go back over the ways they had celebrated the day in former years; at first she held to the old idea that these recollections made her suffer, but presently she perceived that it was not so.  Had her help come from the hills, as Karl had told her it would?

She sat so still that she could hear the ashes falling in the fireplace—­so still that the ticking of her watch on the dressing-table teased her ears.  She seemed to be listening for something—­for something beautiful and solemn.  And by and by the thing she had been waiting for came.

It swept into the house as if all the doors and windows had been thrown wide to receive it.  It was as invisible as the wind, as scentless as a star, as complete as birth or death.  It was peace—­or forgiveness—­or, in a white way, perhaps it was love.

Suddenly she sprang to her feet.