And Hilary Vane received the news with a grim satisfaction, Dr. Tredway believing that it had done more for him than any medicine or specialists.  And when, one warm October day, Victoria herself came and sat beside the canopied bed, her conquest was complete:  he surrendered to her as he had never before surrendered to man or woman or child, and the desire to live surged back into his heart,—­the desire to live for Austen and Victoria.  It became her custom to drive to Ripton in the autumn mornings and to sit by the hour reading to Hilary in the mellow sunlight in the lee of the house, near Sarah Austen’s little garden.  Yes, Victoria believed she had developed in him a taste for reading; although he would have listened to Emerson from her lips.

And sometimes, when she paused after one of his long silences to glance at him, she would see his eyes fixed, with a strange rapt look, on the garden or the dim lavender form of Sawanec through the haze, and knew that he was thinking of a priceless thing which he had once possessed, and missed.  Then Victoria would close the volume, and fall to dreaming, too.

What was happiness?  Was it contentment?  If it were, it might endure, —­contentment being passive.  But could active, aggressive, exultant joy exist for a lifetime, jealous of its least prerogative, perpetually watchful for its least abatement, singing unending anthems on its conquest of the world?  The very intensity of her feelings at such times sobered Victoria—­alarmed her.  Was not perfection at war with the world’s scheme, and did not achievement spring from a void?

But when Austen appeared, with Pepper, to drive her home to Fairview, his presence never failed to revive the fierce faith that it was his destiny to make the world better, and hers to help him.  Wondrous afternoons they spent together in that stillest and most mysterious of seasons in the hill country—­autumn!  Autumn and happiness!  Happiness as shameless as the flaunting scarlet maples on the slopes, defiant of the dying year of the future, shadowy and unreal as the hills before them in the haze.  Once, after a long silence, she started from a revery with the sudden consciousness of his look intent upon her, and turned with parted lips and eyes which smiled at him out of troubled depths.

“Dreaming, Victoria?” he said.

“Yes,” she answered simply, and was silent once more.  He loved these silences of hers,—­hinting, as they did, of unexplored chambers in an inexhaustible treasure-house which by some strange stroke of destiny was his.  And yet he felt at times the vague sadness of them, like the sadness of the autumn, and longed to dispel it.

“It is so wonderful,” she went on presently, in a low voice, “it is so wonderful I sometimes think that it must be like—­like this; that it cannot last.  I have been wondering whether we shall be as happy when the world discovers that you are great.”

He shook his head at her slowly, in mild reproof.