“IT’S love that makes the world go round,” said I next morning at breakfast.

“What makes the merry-go-round?” said Ethel.

“The answer to that will be found in the May number,” said I. “You ought not to ask conundrums, whose answers have to be thought up. But isn’t it so? Hasn’t Minerva been an angel ever since James came and if she isn’t in love with him what is she?”

“If that’s another conundrum, I give it up, too. Do you suppose that James loves her?”

“It wouldn’t surprise me. Minerva is not bad looking and she has a happy disposition in the main,” said I, as Ethel passed me my coffee.

“My, yes, she’s a different creature from what she was when she first saw these hills. This morning she actually told me that the sunsets up here had more colors in them than they had in New York, and that they were bigger. She’s beginning to take notice. I must give her a nature lesson. Something has always happened to prevent it.”

“I don’t think the need for it exists now that she has James. He’s all the study she needs.”

“Yes, but if we should come up here next summer, and James should not prove constant, it would be something if she loved the country for its own sake.”

Just then Minerva came in with a dish of brains; a present from Bert’s father, who sent the pleasant message that they always threw the stuff away, but he knew that city folks had queer tastes.

“Minerva, what were you going to do this morning?” asked Ethel.

“Nothin’, ma’am,” said she innocently.

“You mean nothing in particular,” said Ethel, knowing that no impertinence was intended. “Suppose you take some of those new kitchen towels to hem and we’ll go out into the fields and I’ll tell you something about the flowers.”

“I got some sewin’ of my own to do if you’ll let me,” said Minerva.

“Why certainly. You know, Minerva, as long as you get your work done each day, I don’t care what you do for yourself.”

“No’m, I know you don’t. I don’t either ma’am.”

I looked up hastily, but Minerva was guiltless of any attempt at repartee. She was simply acquiescing with her mistress.

Having nothing better to do than loaf, I went with Ethel to a place called the wintergreen lot, about a half mile distant, and Minerva followed after with a lot of white stuff that reminded me strongly of the day I was married. I am not up in feminine fabrics, and the thing might have been mosquito netting.

The day was hot and sultry. Hanging over Egerton in the southwest were great black, wicked looking clouds that portended thunder storms. We had so far escaped without one, although we had several times heard distant thunder and had seen a storm following the course of the river in the west.

“Shall we take umbrellas?” said Ethel.

“What’s the use?” said I. “If it rains we’ll probably get wet anyway, and in such hot weather as this a wetting won’t hurt.”

So we went unhampered by umbrellas, and after a walk through a tree-embowered road, whose beauty we were told had been marked for destruction by the brass mill, but of which destruction the happy trees were all ignorant, we reached the wintergreen lot, and Ethel, spreading a shawl, seated herself on the mossy ground, while I perched on a rock until it got too hard, when I changed to another rock.

“Minerva, do you see that little red berry in the grass?” said Ethel.

“Yas’m.”

“Well, pick it and I’ll tell you something about it.”

I sniffed. Ethel’s love of outdoor life is very real, but she is not a botanist. “She knows what she likes” in nature, but she can’t tell why.

She heard the sniff and her lips came together to form a noiseless word that she bestows upon me when she thinks I need it.

Then she smiled at me and took from a little bag she had brought with her Mrs. Dana’s book, “How to Know the Wild Flowers,” which she had evidently found among the Wheelock’s possessions.

“That, Minerva, is the wintergreen berry. Taste it and tell me what it reminds you of.”

Minerva’s wide mouth enveloped the dainty berry and she crushed it with her tongue. Then she beamed.

“Chewin’ gum,” said she. “Wish I had some.”

“Well, I wasn’t thinking of that, but they do flavor chewing gum with it, I believe. But could you get anything in the city as pretty as that?”

“Yas’m.”

“What, Minerva?”

“Cramberries.”

“Yes, but they don’t grow in the city. Now here’s something that I never noticed before. It says in this book that ‘he who seeks the cool shade of the evergreens on a hot July day is likely to discover the nodding wax-like flowers of this little plant.’ Now let’s see if we can find any. It doesn’t seem likely that the fruit and the blossom would be blooming at the same time.”

“They are, though,” said I. “Found that out when I was a boy. I can never taste wintergreen berries without being reminded of a girl that—”

“Wait, Philip, we’ll be back. I want to see if I can get a flower.”

Ethel always cuts me off when I make any references to my lost youth. She calls them my calf love days and takes no interest in them, while I contend that some of the happiest moments in a man’s life are when he roams the fields in retrospect with a girl who is always ten times prettier than anyone he ever met. I once met one of those old-time beauties and the shock was terrific. I tried to restore her features as I gazed at her, but my imagination balked at the task. She was a good woman, the mother of seven good children, but the vision of the lovely, dancing-eyed, pink-cheeked, rosebud-mouthed, shell-like-eared, dimple-chinned naiad of my early youth was gone.

From the way in which she looked at me, I felt ............