“It’s all queer.”  She rose from the leather chair, and held out her hand.  “I’m glad I came in, Mr. O’Hara.  Some day you must tell me the rest.”

“The rest?” His embarrassment had descended upon him, and he was awkwardly stammering for words, with her cool hand in his grasp.  As long as his enthusiasm had lasted he had talked fluently and naturally, swept away from his self-consciousness; but with the return of the formal amenities he became as ill at ease and shy as a boy.  “There ain’t anything more except that we’re building a railroad out there, and I’m going back to finish it next spring if I’m alive.”

The September breeze entered from the dim stretch of yard, under the waving elm boughs, and in an instant the room was filled with the fragrance of mignonette.

“But you won’t be if you never get your dinner,” she retorted, as she smiled brilliantly.  Then, turning quickly, she crossed the threshold, and went down the hall to the staircase.

She was tremendously excited, and while she mounted the stairs she felt that she had not been so alive, so filled with energy since her girlhood in Richmond.  It was as if a closed door into the world had been suddenly flung open, and she knew that she had passed beyond the narrow paths of convention into the sunny roads and broad fields of vision.  In a moment of enlightenment she saw deeper and farther than she had ever dreamed of seeing before.  “It teaches one not to judge,” she thought, with a stab of self-reproach, “it teaches one not to judge others until one really knows.”  Twice before to-night, on the day when she resolved for the sake of Jane’s children to go to work, and again on the June evening when George returned to her, she had felt this sudden quickening of life, this magical sense of the unexplored mystery and beauty of the world that surrounded her.  But she had been very young then, and on that June evening she had been deeply in love.  To-night, she assured herself, there was no touch of personal romance.  In some inexplicable way the talk with O’Hara had renewed her broken connection with her Dream, and she felt closer in sympathy to Arthur than she had been able to feel for months.  No, this awakening was utterly different from the awakening of love, for it shed its illumination not on a single person, but on the whole of humanity.  O’Hara had moved her, not as a man, but as a force—­a force as impersonal as the wind or the sea, which had swept her intellect away from its anchorage in the deeps of tradition.  She had thought herself free, but she understood now that she had never really broken away—­that in spite of her struggles to escape, the past had still held her.  To-night it was more than an awakening, it was a conversion through which she was passing, and she knew she could never again believe as she had believed a few hours ago, that she could never judge again as unintelligently as she had judged yesterday.  “So that is a man’s world,” and then with a rush of