Page:The Fruit of the Tree (Wharton 1907).djvu/314

Rh brief joy of her participation in his work; then the sorrow of their child’s death, and after that the temporary exhilaration of carrying out his ideas at Westmore—but now that the last of these veils had been torn away they faced each other as strangers.

The habit of keeping factory hours always drove Amherst forth long before his wife’s day began, and in the course of one of his early tramps he met Miss Brent and Cicely setting out for a distant swamp where rumour had it that a rare native orchid might be found. Justine’s sylvan tastes had developed in the little girl a passion for such pillaging expeditions, and Cicely, who had discovered that her step-father knew almost as much about birds and squirrels as Miss Brent did about ﬂowers, was not to be appeased till Amherst had scrambled into the pony-cart, wedging his long legs between a fern-box and a lunch-basket, and balancing a Scotch terrier’s telescopic body across his knees.

The season was so mild that only one or two light windless frosts had singed the foliage of oaks and beeches, and gilded the roadsides with a smooth carpeting of maple leaves. The morning haze rose like smoke from burnt-out pyres of sumach and sugar-maple; a silver bloom lay on the furrows of the ploughed ﬁelds; and now and then, as they drove on, the wooded [ 298 ]