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 nature. 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.