Jerry flicked at the horse's ears and spoke out of his maze of dreamy antic.i.p.ation.

"Seems if I should know her the minute I put eyes on her."

"Well, I guess you will," she encouraged him. "Maybe she's the only boarder they've got, so far."

"No, no, I don't mean that. Seems if I knew exactly how she ought to look."

"How d' you think, Jerry?" she inquired confidentially, as if his fancies were valuable and delightful to her. That was the tone she always had for him. Jerry would have said, if he had needed to think anything about it, that Marietta was the easiest person to talk to in the whole world. But he never did think about it. She was a part of his interchange with life, as real and as inevitable as his own hungers and satisfactions.

"Well," he said, while the horse slackened into a walk, with the grade of Blossom Hill, "I guess she's light-complexioned. Don't you?"

"Maybe," nodded Marietta kindly. "You can't tell."

"I guess she don't weigh very heavy," said Jerry, in a shamefaced bluntness, as if he wronged the absent G.o.ddess through such crudities.

"You can't seem to see anybody that's had the thoughts she has and the way she's got of putting 'em--you can't see 'em very big-framed or heavy, can you? I can't, anyways."

"No," said Marietta, looking down at her own plump hands folded on her knee--"no, I don't know 's you can. Only see, Jerry! I always thought this little rise was about the prettiest view there is betwixt us and the Rocky Mountains."

They were on the top of Blossom Hill again, and Jerry drew the horse to a halt before winding down. All the kingdoms of the earth seemed, in Marietta's eyes, to be spread out before them. There was the rolling land of farms and villages, and beyond it the line of haze that meant, they knew, the sea. Tears filled her eyes. Then her gaze came home to an apple-tree by the side of the road.

"You see that tree, Jerry?" she asked. "Well, I've always called that Mother's Tree. Once, the last o' May, we borrowed Lote's team and climbed up here, and here was that tree in full bloom. Mother had a kind of a pretty way of putting things, and she said 'twas like a bride.

'Some trees are all over pink,' she says, 'but this is white as the drifted snow.' And the winter mother died, I rode up over this hill again, to get her some things to be buried in, and I stopped and looked at that tree. It snowed the night before, and 'twas all over white, and sparkling in the sun. I spoke right out loud. 'Mother's Tree,' I says."

"Sho!" said Jerry. "You never mentioned that before. Anybody could almost write something out o' that."

"Could you?" asked Marietta, brightening. "I wish you would. I should admire to have you."

Jerry's excitement of the night before had waned a little. Suddenly he felt tired and chill, and, although the purpose of his journey had not been accomplished, as if the zest of things had gone.

"Marietta," said he, starting on the horse, "do you think much about growing old?"

"I guess I don't," said Marietta brightly, and at once. "That's a terrible foolish thing to do. Least, so it seems to me."

"But you don't feel as you did fifteen years ago, do you, Marietta?" He asked it wistfully.

She was ready with her prompt a.s.surance.

"I don't know 's I do. Don't seem as if 'twould be natural if I did.

Take a tree, take that apple-tree back there--I don't know 's you could say it had the same feelings it did when it sprouted up out o' the seeds. We're in a kind of a procession, seems if, marching along towards--well, I don't know what all. But wherever we're going, it's all right, I say. It's all right."

They were silent then for a time, each scanning the roadsides and the vista before them framed in drooping branches and enriched by springing sward.

"You seem to have a good deal of faith, Marietta," said he suddenly.

"But you ain't much of a hand to talk about it."

"Course I got faith," she answered. "It ain't any use for anybody to tell me there ain't a good time coming. I don't have to conjure up some kind of a hope. I know."

"How do you know?" asked Jerry.

She gave a sudden irrepressible laugh.

"I guess it's because the sky is so pretty," she said. "Maybe the robins have got something to do with it. Days like this I feel as if I was right inside the pearly gates. I truly do."

They were entering the shade of evergreens that bordered the ravine road, where there were striated cliffs, and little runnels came trickling down to join the stream below.

"I guess there ain't a spot round here that means more to folks in our neighborhood than this," said Marietta. "Remember the time somebody wanted to name it 'Picnic Road'? There were seventeen picnics that summer, if I recollect, all in our set."

"Yes," said Jerry. He remembered his poem about the "awesome amphitheatre nature wrought," and wondered if Marietta also recalled it and would quote some of it. But she only said:--

"That kind of a round where we used to eat our suppers is about the prettiest spot I ever see. That's where I'm going to set up my tent whilst you're making your call. When you come back you can poke right on in there and 'coot,' and I'll answer."

Jerry's mercurial spirits were mounting now. The past few minutes had given him two beautiful subjects for poetry. He could make some four-lined verses, he thought, about the tree that was a bride in spring and the next winter robed for burial. He could hear the cadence of them now, beating through his head in premonitory measures. Then there was the other fancy that life was a procession to an unknown goal. Jerry had read very little, except in the works of Ruth Bellair and her compeers, and the imaginings he wrought in had a way of seeming new and strange.

The talk went on, drifting back irresistibly by the familiar way they were taking to the spring of their own lives, not, it seemed, in search of a lost youth, but as if they had it with them, an invisible third, in all their memories.

"Here we are," said Jerry. He drew up at the bars that led into old Blaisdell's sugar-camp, and Marietta, not waiting for him, sprang out over the wheel. "You're as light as a feather," said he admiringly, but with no sense of wonder. They were still in that childhood land where everybody is agile for one long, bright day.

"Light as a bun," returned Marietta flippantly. "Here, you wait a minute till I get me out my basket. When you come back you be sure to coot."

Jerry drove on a step or two, and then drew in the horse. Just as she had set her basket over the bars and was prepared to follow, he called to her:--

"Marietta, I believe I'll leave the team."

Marietta understood. She came back readily.

"Well," she said, "I think 'twould look better, myself."

"I can hitch to the bars, same as we used to," Jerry continued.

"Remember how Underhill's old Buckskin used to crib the fence? Here's the very piece of zinc Blaisdell nailed on that summer we were here so much."

He had turned and driven back, and while he tied the horse, Marietta took out the box of lilies.

"I guess you better hold these loose in your hand," she said tentatively. "Seems to me 'twould look more appropriate."

Jerry nodded. They both had a vision of the poet going on foot to the lady of his dreams, his lilies in his hand. Marietta lifted the cover of the box and unrolled them deftly. She looked about her for an instant, and then, finding feasible standing-ground, went to one of the runnels dripping down the cliff and paused there, holding the lily stems in the cool laving of the fall. Jerry, the horse tied, stood watching her and waiting. The bright blue of her dress shone softly against the wet brown and black of the cliff wall, and the pink of her cheeks glowed above it like a rosy light. Marietta had thought her dress far too gay when she bought it, but the dusk of the ravine road had toned it down to a tint the picture needed for full harmony. Jerry, though the familiar spot and her presence in it soothed and pleased him, was running ahead with his eager mind to the farm where Ruth Bellair stood waiting at the gate. Of course she was not really waiting for him, because she did not know he was coming, nor even that he lived at all. When he had mailed her the package of autumn leaves Marietta had pressed, he had not sent his name with them. Yet it seemed to him appropriate that she should be standing, a girlish figure, by the Moodys' gate, to let him in. After that they would walk up the path together, she carrying the lilies; and perhaps in the orchard, where the trees were in bloom, they would pace back and forth together and talk and talk. Jerry knew it was too early for apple-trees to be blossoming, even in this weather, but the orchard where Ruth Bellair walked would be white and pink. So he took his lilies in his hand and strode away, and Marietta watched him. At the turn of the road he stopped and waved his hand to her.

"Good-by!" called Marietta. "Good luck! Good-by!" Then a little sob choked her, and she stamped her foot. "What a fool!" said Marietta, addressing herself, and she walked to the bars with great determination, let down one, "scooched" to go through, and, picking up her basket, went on to the amphitheatre. Jerry need not have wondered whether she remembered his ornate poem. She did, every word of it, and as she walked she said it to herself in a murmuring tone. When she was within the beloved inclosure she paused a moment before setting down her basket, and looked about her. The place was not so grand as her childish eyes had found it, only a great semicircle of ground brown with pine needles and surrounded by ancient trees; but it was beautiful enough. Strangely, she had not visited it for years. Her own mates no longer came, because they were doing quiet things at home, farming and household tasks, and Marietta would have had no mind, if she had been invited, to make one of a serious middle-aged rout taking its annual pleasure with a difference.

"I'd rather by half be alone," she said aloud, as she looked about her, "or maybe with one other that feels as I do."

Then she put down her basket and went, by a path she knew, to the spring cleaned of fallen leaves by the first picnickers of every season. There it was, the little kind pool with its bottom of sand and its fringing gra.s.ses, the cress she had planted once with her own hands and now beginning to show brightly green. Marietta knelt and drank from her hollowed palm. The cup was in the basket. When Jerry came back he should have it to slake his thirst; and presently she returned to the amphitheatre and lay down on the pine-needles, to look up through the boughs at glints of sky, and think and think. Perhaps it was not thought, after all. It followed no road, but stayed an instant on a pine bough, as a bird alights and then flies out through the upper branches to the sky itself.

Marietta could not help feeling happy, in a still, unreasoning way. She had not had an easy youth. It had been full of poverty and fears, and her later life had been lived on one monotonous level of satisfying her own bare wants and finding nothing left for luxury. But something, some singing inner voice, was always, in these later days, bidding her take hope. She was not expectant of definite delights; she only cherished an irresponsible certainty. When the door opened to let in spring, it seemed to show her heaven also, and she gave herself up to the gladness of it. If Marietta had been able to scrutinize her inner being, she would probably have owned that she found Jerry Freelands' influence upon her a great and guiding one. It was, she knew, a precious privilege to know a poet, and to see the natural and spiritual worlds through his discerning eyes. It would have seemed to her wonderful to be a poet herself. Ruth Bellair, waiting in unconscious sovereignty for Jerry to seek her out and lay lilies at her feet, was, she knew, the happiest woman in the spring world. Yet the soft air moved the pines to wavelike murmurings, and Marietta too was happy.

It was nearly three o'clock when Jerry came back, and before that Marietta had roused herself to open her basket and spread a napkin on the big flat stone that made the picnic-table. She had laid a pile of fine white bread and b.u.t.ter on the cloth, a paper twist of pickles, because picnickers, according to tradition, are the better for consuming pickles, and some of her own superior sugar gingerbread. The cup was there waiting for Jerry to take it to the spring. Then she listened for him. He did not give the expected coot, but came through the forest glade silently and with a halting step. When Marietta saw him her heart ran forward, before her feet. Jerry looked an older man; his years were so apparent to her that it seemed for a foolish instant as if his father were advancing toward her out of the past where she and Jerry had been young together. She hurried forward.

"What is it?" she besought. "What's happened?"

His dull eyes turned upon her absently. He took off his hat and dropped it at his feet.