Already now the days were dawning red through the mist. Invisible hands veiled the valley, which was open to the house's gaze. And, where the hillside woods had closed off a vista all summer, those hands again revealed mysterious paths and wide spaces among the falling leaves.

While many treetops still wore their autumn colors, those higher up the hill and more shaken by the brisk east wind stood bare, with the medlars clinging to their branches like abandoned nests.

The birds had yet to land on the balcony of the house, their old feeding station, and instead were reaping a late harvest in the orchard meadow and stubble field — they merely flitted by, only more and more often, as if guided by memories of past winters. On the dew-covered outer walls, ladybugs crept busily along, tiny polkadots of summer color, marching on in the wake of the receding warmth. Late-season butterflies tumbled in through open windows as if, in dying, they were searching for the vanished flowerbeds. But, among the trees in the garden, no matter how often people walked there, the spiders were secretly spinning their solitudes anew from trunk to trunk — delicate webworks full of silver dew and always fresh, intact, and untouched: the mysteries and miracles of an autumn celebrating for itself the rites of its own return.

Out among the fruit trees, Anneliese strolled slowly back and forth in the Sunday morning light. Taking more time than an entire letter might require, she read the last page of what Balder had written from Rome: