"I guess there's something wrong with the range—you'll have to get somebody to mend it," she brought out in a queer thin voice, as if she had been running. On the table was her untidy work basket, and near it were more white rags, or handkerchiefs or something, in a dirty heap. She crammed them into the basket, looking at him sideways. "Baby clothes?—" he thought, half dismayed, half exultant. He stood a moment irresolute, finding no words; but suddenly she spoke again, in the same breathless reedy voice. "You better go and find somebody to repair it… ."

"Oh, Lord. I'll see first if I can't do it myself," he grumbled, remembering the cost of the last repairs to the range.

"No, no, you can't. You better go out somewhere and get your dinner today," she added.

"What'll you eat then?"

She gave the same grin, which so unnaturally bared the edges of her pale pink gums. "Oh, I'll take some milk. You better go out for your dinner. Then I'll lie down," she insisted breathlessly.

He stood doubtful, his book palpitating in him. The glorious blue air invited him—very likely she'd be glad to have a rest. He noticed the purplish rings about her eyes, and thought again: "It might be that," recalling the scenes in fiction in which blushing wives announce their coming motherhood. But Laura Lou did not seem to want to announce anything, and he was too shy to force her silence. "Want to get rid of me today, do you?" he joked; and she nodded, without other acquiescence than that of her queer fixed smile.

He rummaged in the cupboard for bread, and a piece of the cheese they had had for supper; with an apple from the magic tree it would be all he wanted. He would go on a long tramp, to a wonderful swampy wood he knew of, the first to catch fire from the autumn frosts. A sense of holiday freedom flamed through him. "Well, so long," he called out, nodding back from the door. Her fixed smile answered. "She looks sick," he thought—and then forgot her.

Magic—why not call the book that? The air was full of it today. All the poetry which the American imagination rejects seemed to have taken refuge in the American landscape, like a Daphne not fleeing from Apollo but awaiting his call to resume her human loveliness. Vance felt the dumb entreaty of that trembling beauty with arms outstretched to warmth and light from the slope of the descending year. As the mood grew on him the blood of the earth seemed to flow in his veins, his own to burn in red maple branch and golden shreds of traveller's joy. It was all part of that mysteriously interwoven texture of the universe, in the thought of which a man could lie down as in his bed… .