Jerry Freelands felt that the day was not suitably ended if, after tidying up the kitchen and practicing "The Harp That Once" and "Oft in the Stilly Night" on his fiddle, he did not go across the fields to Marietta Martin\'s and compare the moment\'s mood with her, either in the porch or at her fireside, according to the season. They lived, each alone, in a stretch of meadow land just off the main road, and nobody knew how many of their evenings they spent together, or, at this middle stage in their lives, would have drawn romantic conclusions if the tale of them had been told.

In his youth Jerry had been a solitary, given to wandering "by the river\'s brim," as he liked to say, thinking of poetry and his fiddle. Marietta, even at that time, had been learning tailoring to support her mother, and she looked upon Jerry with unstinted admiration as too distinctly set apart by high attainments ever to be considered a common earthly swain. But Jerry did all his duties as if he were not gifted. He carried on the small farm, and, after his sister married and went away, nursed his mother until [315]her death—"as handy as a woman," so the neighbors said. Yet he knew that all this tribute to the lower life was only something mysteriously decreed, perhaps to ballast the soul lest it soar too high. The real things were fiddle-playing and writing verse, sometimes inspired by nature and again by love or death, and publishing it in the county paper. Jerry had one consolation, one delight, besides and above Marietta. This was the poetess, Ruth Bellair, and it was of her he was thinking as he crossed the field, this darkening twilight, to Marietta\'s house. There was a warm spring wind, and frogs were peeping. Jerry knew, although it was too dark to see, that down by the brook the procession of willows walked in a mist of green. It was a broken sky, with here and there a star between soft wafts of cloud, and the newness and beauty of the time smote upon him as he hurried on, and made him young again. He walked faster than usual, a tall, lightly moving figure, his head under his soft felt hat thrown forward and his loose hair blown back by the swiftness of his going. Time seemed to have fallen away from him at the call of some new anticipation. He was not a man nearing fifty as the morning\'s sun had found him, but a youth with the mountain-top splendidly near and the rising sun to light his steps.

[316]Marietta lived in a little, low-browed, gambrel-roofed house, with a vegetable garden in the back, a flower garden in front, and an orchard at the west side. She had sold the adjoining meadows and also the woodland, because she said it was better to lessen care as you grew older, and she was a poor hand to keep up a farm. Marietta was of those who are perhaps not calm by inheritance, but who have attained serenity because life proves it to be desirable. To-night she saw Jerry coming and met him at the door, a plump, fresh-colored woman with sweet brows, thick white hair, and blue eyes full of a wistful sympathy. She was younger than he, yet her acquired calmness had given her a matronly air and made her the one to assume protection and a gentle way of giving. As she stood there in the doorway, lamp in hand, she looked like a benignant mother waiting to greet a returning child.

"Well, Marietta," said Jerry.

He stopped a moment before her on the doorstone and drew the quick breath of the haste of his coming. Then he took off his hat, stayed for one look at the night behind him, and followed her in. Marietta put the lamp on the high mantel, and moved his chair slightly nearer the hearth. There was no fire, but the act seemed to make him more intimately welcome. Then she [317]seated herself on the sofa between the two side windows and folded her hands for an evening\'s intercourse. Jerry took out his pipe, held it absently for a moment, and laid it down on the table. Marietta hardly liked that. He must be moved indeed, she knew, if he meant to forego his evening smoke. Jerry sat forward a little in his chair and let his long hands, loosely clasped, hang between his knees. He gazed straight out through the dark window as if he could see the lovely night pulsating there, and his bright gray eyes seemed to hold gleams of an extreme anticipation. Then he remembered the world where he found himself, this clean exquisite room with its homely furnishings, where he had become as familiar as if it were a secondary shell that fitted him so completely he hardly noticed it, and turned to her with an effect of winking his eyes open after a dream.

"Marietta," said he, "who do you suppose has come?"

She shook her head in an attentive interest.

He kept his gaze on her as if it were all incredible.

"Ruth Bellair," he said solemnly.

Now she did start, and her lips parted in the surprise of it.

"Not here?" she insisted. "You don\'t mean she\'s come here?"

[318]He shook his head.

"No. She\'s at Poplar Bridge. The paper said so to-night."

"What\'s she there for?"

"She\'s come to board. The paper said so. \'The well-known poetess, Ruth Bellair, has arrived to spend the summer at the commodious boarding establishment of L. H. Moody.\'"

He looked at her in a pale triumph, and she stared back at him with all the emotion he could have wished.

"I can\'t hardly believe it," she said faintly.

"That\'s it," he nodded at her. "Nobody could believe it. Why, Marietta, do you suppose there\'s been a night I\'ve sat here that I haven\'t either read some of her pieces to you, or told you something I\'d seen about her in the papers?"

"No," said Marietta, rather wearily, yet with a careful interest, "you haven\'t talked about anything else scarcely."

He was looking at her out of the same solemn assurance that it had been commendable in him to preserve that romantic loyalty.

"She begun to write about the time I did," he said, tasting the flavor of reminiscence. "I used to see her name in the papers when I never so much as thought I should write a line myself. She\'s been a great influence in my life, Marietta."

[319]"Yes, course she has," Marietta responded, rising to the height of his emotion. "I guess she\'s influenced a good many folks."

"Well, I\'ve got my chance. She\'s here within ten miles of us, and come what may, I\'m bound to see her."

Marietta started.

"See her?" she repeated. "How under the sun you going to do that? You don\'t know her, nor any of her folks. Seems if she\'d think \'twas terrible queer."

"She\'s used to it," said Jerry raptly. "She must be. People with gifts like that—why, of course folks go to see \'em."

He was removed and silent after this, and had scarcely a word for Marietta\'s late-blooming calla that had held her in suspense through the winter when she had wanted it, to unroll its austere deliciousness now in the spring. She brought him the heavy pot almost timidly, and Jerry put out his hand and touched the snowy texture of the bloom. But he did it absently, and she understood that his mind was not with her, and that there was little likelihood of his inditing a set of verses to the lily, as she had hoped. He got up and carried it to the stand for her, and there he paused for a moment beside it, coming awake, she thought. But after that period of musing he took up his hat from the little table [320]between the windows and stood there holding it.

"Marietta," said he, with a simple and moved directness, "what if I should carry her one of these?"

"One of my lilies?"

"Yes."

She brushed a bit of dust from a smooth green leaf, and the color rose to her face. She seemed to conquer something.

"When you going?" she asked, in a subdued tone.

"I thought I\'d go to-morrow."

"Well, you can have the lily, all three of \'em if you want—have \'em and welcome."

He was at the door now, his hand on the latch. Marietta, watching him still with that flush on her cheeks and a suffused look of the calm blue eyes, noted how he stood gazing down, as if already he were planning his trip, and as if the anticipation were affecting to him.

He straightened suddenly and met her glance.

"You\'re real good, Marietta," he said warmly. "I\'ll call in the morning and get \'em."

"What time you going?"

"\'Long about ten, I guess. Good-night."

When she heard the clang of the gate behind him she went slowly in and stood by her lily for a moment, looking down at it, and not so much [321]thinking in any definite channel as feeling the queerness of things. Marietta often had longings which she did not classify, for what seemed such foolish matters that, unless she kept them under cover, folks might laugh. The lily was not only a lily to her: it suggested a train of bright imaginings. It was like snow, she thought, like a pale lovely princess, like the sweet-smelling field flower that twisted round a stalk in a beautiful swirl. It seemed quite appropriate to her that Jerry should cut the flowers and carry them to Ruth Bellair. He would know, and the poetess also, what wonderful thing to say about anything so lovely, all in measured lines rhyming to perfection. She sighed once or twice when her head was on the pillow. It seemed amazing to her to be gifted as Jerry and his poetess were, and very stupid to be as dull as she.

Jerry, that night, hardly slept at all. He sat by his hearth, fiddle in hand, sometimes caressingly under his chin, sometimes lying across his knees; but he was not playing. He had opened both windows, so that, although the spring air was cool, he could get the feeling of the night and hurry the beating of his excited heart. Jerry was in no habit of remembering how old he was, and to-night age seemed infinitely removed. He was thinking of poetry and [322]of Ruth Bellair. She had always been what he called his guiding star. Once he wrote a set of verses by that title, and put under it, with a hand trembling at its own audacity, "To R. B." That had never been published, but he had read it to Marietta, and she had said it was beautiful. Ruth Bellair had always seemed very far above him, for although he wrote poetry the county paper accepted in prodigious quantities, she did verse of a sort that appeared in loftier journals. She had written "The Hole in the Baby\'s Shoe," which mothers had cut out and pinned on the window curtain, and children had spoken on Last Day, to the accompaniment of tears from assembled parents. Then there was her sonnet, "Shall I Meet Thee There?" which Jerry had always supposed to have been inspired by a departed lover, and many, many others that touched the heart and were easy to remember, they ran so steadily, with such a constant beat. Jerry knew exactly how she would look. She would have golden hair and blue eyes, and what she had called in one of her poems the "tender gift of tears." He had always, in fancy, seen her dressed in blue, because that was his favorite color, though he reflected that he might as easily find her clad in white.

It was only toward morning that he slept, his fiddle on the table now, but very near, as if [323]they had shared a solemn vigil and it still knew how he might feel in dreams.

It was about ten o\'clock when he stopped at Marietta\'s gate with the light wagon and sober white horse he had borrowed from Lote Purington, "down the road." Marietta was ready at the door, a long white box in her hand.

"I been watching for you," she said. "I went up attic, where I could see you turn the corner. Then I snipped \'em off, and here they are."

Jerry took the box with a grave decorum, as if it represented something precious to him, and disposed it in the back of the wagon under the light robe.

"I\'m obliged to you, Marietta," he said. "This\'ll mean a good deal to me." He stepped into the wagon again and took up the reins. Then the calm and beneficence of the spring day struck him as it had not before, in his hurried preparations, and he looked down at Marietta. They had always had a good deal to say to each other about the weather, and he knew she would understand. "It\'s spring, Marietta," he said, with a simplicity he had never thought it desirable to put into his verse.

"Yes," she answered, as quietly, yet with a thrill in her voice. "I don\'t hardly think I ever saw a prettier day."

There was such a mist of green that the earth [324]seemed to be breathing it out in swirls and billows. It was impossible to say whether there were more riot and surge in the budding ground, or in the heavens, where clouds flew swiftly. The birds were singing, all kinds together, in a tumultuous harmony. Jerry felt light-headed with the wonder of it; but Marietta had an ache at her heart, she did not know why, though she was used to that kind of thing when the outside world struck her as being full of tremulous appeals without any answers.

Though Jerry had the reins in his hands, he did not go. Instead, he continued looking at her standing there in her freshness of good health and the candor of her gaze that seemed to him, next to his mother\'s face, the kindest thing he had ever known. The blue of her eyes and the blue of her dress matched each other in a lovely way. He felt that he had something to say to her, but he could not remember what it was. Suddenly a robin on the fence burst into adjurations of a robust sort, and Marietta, without meaning to, spoke. She had always said since her childhood that a robin bewitched her—he was so happy and so pert.

"Jerry," said she, "what if I should get my hat and ride with you as far as Ferny Woods?"

"So do," said Jerry, with a perfect cordiality. "So do."

[325]"It\'s a pretty day," Marietta asserted again; but he cut her short, advising her to get ready, and she ran in, a flush on her cheeks and lightness in her step. When she came out she had made no conventional preparations for a drive. She had only pinned on her broad black hat and taken off her apron. She carried a little oblong basket with a cover, and this she set carefully in the back of the wagon, with the lilies. Jerry alighted gallantly to help her in, and when he had started up the horse it was Marietta who began speaking. Usually she was rather silent, following Jerry\'s lead, but to-day the warmth and beauty and song had liberated something in her spirit, and she had to talk back to the talking earth.

"You know Ferny Woods are much as a mile this side of the Moodys\'," she was saying. "You can just leave me there, and then you can go along and make your call."

"It seems pretty mean not to take you with me," Jerry offered haltingly. Yet he knew, as she did, that he had no desire to take her. This was his own sacred pilgrimage.

"Oh, I wouldn\'t go for anything," she answered eagerly. "You\'ve looked forward to it so long—well, not exactly that, for you didn\'t know she was coming. But it means a good deal to you. And I don\'t care a mite. I truly don\'t, not a mite."

[326]Jerry flicked at the horse\'s ears and spoke out of his maze of dreamy anticipation.

"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 goddess through such crudities. "You can\'t seem to see anybody that\'s had the thoughts she has and the way she\'s got [327]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............