It was lying on the wet grass where it had fallen.  There was a half-framed accusing thought that he might have gone for it; but she put the thought away; the time had passed for courtesies from him.  When she stooped for the shawl, an owl flew viciously at her, snapping its bill close to her face and stirring the air with its wings.  Unnerved, she ran back into the porch, but stopped there ashamed and looking kindly toward the tree in which it made its home.

An old vine of darkest green had wreathed itself about the pillars of the veranda on that side; and it was at a frame-like opening in the massive foliage of this that the upper part of her pure white figure now stood revealed in the last low, silvery, mystical light.  The sinking of the moon was like a great death on the horizon, leaving the pall of darkness, the void of infinite loss.

She hung upon this far spectacle of nature with sad intensity, figuring from it some counterpart of the tragedy taking place within her own mind.

II

Isabel slept soundly, the regular habit of healthy years being too firmly entrenched to give way at once.  Meanwhile deep changes were wrought out in her.

When we fall asleep, we do not lay aside the thoughts of the day, as the hand its physical work; nor upon awakening return to the activity of these as it to the renewal of its toil, finding them undisturbed.  Our most piercing insight yields no deeper conception of life than that of perpetual building and unbuilding; and during what we call our rest, it is often most active in executing its inscrutable will.  All along the dark chimneys of the brain, clinging like myriads of swallows deep-buried and slumbrous in quiet and in soot, are the countless thoughts which lately winged the wide heaven of conscious day.  Alike through dreaming and through dreamless hours Life moves among these, handling and considering each of the unredeemable multitude; and when morning light strikes the dark chimneys again and they rush forth, some that entered young have matured; some of the old have become infirm; many of which have dropped in singly issue as companies; and young broods flutter forth, unaccountable nestlings of a night, which were not in yesterday’s blue at all.  Then there are the missing—­those that went in with the rest at nightfall but were struck from the walls forever.  So all are altered, for while we have slept we have still been subject to that on-moving energy of the world which incessantly renews us yet transmutes us—­double mystery of our permanence and our change.

It was thus that nature dealt with Isabel on this night:  hours of swift difficult transition from her former life to that upon which she was now to enter.  She fell asleep overwhelmed amid the ruins of the old; she awoke already engaged with the duties of the new.  At sundown she was a girl who had never confessed her love; at sunrise she was a woman who had discarded the man she had just accepted.  Rising at once and dressing with despatch, she entered upon preparations for completing her spiritual separation from Rowan in every material way.