Page:Saxe Holm's Stories, Series Two.djvu/121

Rh and opens between these hills and forests, there are magnificent vistas of view to distant horizons where rise the peaks and ranges of New England's highest mountains.

Over these roads, under these trees, across these lifted plains, drove John Bassett and Fanny Lane, side by side, every afternoon for six weeks. The two elderly ladies behind, wrapped in their cloaks and shawls, and often half asleep, little dreamed of the drama whose prelude was so quietly and fatefully arranging and arraying its forces on the front seat. Fanny Lane was a genuine and passionate lover of the country. As soon as she entered it, the artificiality, the paltry ambitions, the false standards of her city life, fell away from her like dead husks. She was another woman. Had her whole life been passed thus face to face with the nature she was born to love, she had been indeed another and a nobler person. As it was, all that her few months interval of each year of summer and out-door life did for her was to give her a marvelous added physical health, a suberabundance of vitality, which country life can never give to any one who does not love it with his whole soul. There seemed sometimes almost a mockery in the carrying back to the senseless dissipations and excitements of a gay city winter the zest and capacity to endure and to enjoy, born of woods and fields and sunrises and sunsets. But this was what Fanny Lane did