Isabel sat idly on the veranda of her old hotel as was her habit in the evening hour. There had been no heavy rains as yet to freshen the hills and swell the tides until the salt waters scalded the juices from the marsh grass, turning it from green to bronze and red; and the barometer was stationary. A cool wind came in from the sea with the flood, and Isabel enjoyed the beauty that was hers all the more luxuriously in her thick shawl of white wool. A great part of the valley north and south was within the range of her vision, and it was suffused with gold under a sky that looked like an inverted crucible pouring down its treasures in the prodigal fashion of the land. Facing her house and on the opposite side of the marsh, at its widest here, was a high wall of rock, from which the valley
