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

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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.




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