A rich and mellow light, singularly clear, seemed to flood out of some unknown source.  For the sun was hidden.  The clouds just above Carley hung low, and they were like thick, heavy smoke, mushrooming, coalescing, forming and massing, of strange yellow cast of mative.  It shaded westward into heliotrope and this into a purple so royal, so matchless and rare that Carley understood why the purple of the heavens could never be reproduced in paint.  Here the cloud mass thinned and paled, and a tint of rose began to flush the billowy, flowery, creamy white.  Then came the surpassing splendor of this cloud pageant—­a vast canopy of shell pink, a sun-fired surface like an opal sea, rippled and webbed, with the exquisite texture of an Oriental fabric, pure, delicate, lovely—­as no work of human hands could be.  It mirrored all the warm, pearly tints of the inside whorl of the tropic nautilus.  And it ended abruptly, a rounded depth of bank, on a broad stream of clear sky, intensely blue, transparently blue, as if through the lambent depths shone the infinite firmament.  The lower edge of this stream took the golden lightning of the sunset and was notched for all its horizon-long length by the wondrous white glistening-peaked range of the Rockies.  Far to the north, standing aloof from the range, loomed up the grand black bulk and noble white dome of Pikes Peak.

Carley watched the sunset transfiguration of cloud and sky and mountain until all were cold and gray.  And then she returned to her seat, thoughtful and sad, feeling that the West had mockingly flung at her one of its transient moments of loveliness.

Nor had the West wholly finished with her.  Next day the mellow gold of the Kansas wheat fields, endless and boundless as a sunny sea, rich, waving in the wind, stretched away before her aching eyes for hours and hours.  Here was the promise fulfilled, the bountiful harvest of the land, the strength of the West.  The great middle state had a heart of gold.

East of Chicago Carley began to feel that the long days and nights of riding, the ceaseless turning of the wheels, the constant and wearing stress of emotion, had removed her an immeasurable distance of miles and time and feeling from the scene of her catastrophe.  Many days seemed to have passed.  Many had been the hours of her bitter regret and anguish.

Indiana and Ohio, with their green pastoral farms, and numberless villages, and thriving cities, denoted a country far removed and different from the West, and an approach to the populous East.  Carley felt like a wanderer coming home.  She was restlessly and impatiently glad.  But her weariness of body and mind, and the close atmosphere of the car, rendered her extreme discomfort.  Summer had laid its hot hand on the low country east of the Mississippi.