" Fanny called from the open window.

"Nothin'," replied Andrew.

Chapter XVII

Ellen had always had objective points, as it were, in her life, and
she always would have, no matter how long she lived. She came to
places where she stopped mentally, for retrospection and
forethought, wherefrom she could seem to obtain a view of that which
lay behind, and of the path which was set for her feet in advance.
She saw the tracked and the trackless. Once, going with Abby Atkins
and Floretta in search of early spring flowers, Ellen had lingered
and let them go out of sight, and had sat down on a springing mat of
wintergreen leaves under the windy outstretch of a great pine, and
had remained there quite deaf to shrill halloos. She had sat there
with eyes of inward scrutiny like an Eastern sage's, motionless as
on a rock of thought, while her daily life eddied around her. Ellen,
sitting there, had said to herself: "This I will always remember. No
matter how long I live, where I am, and what happens to me, I will
always remember how I was a child, and sat here this morning in
spring under the pine-tree, looking backward and forward. I will
never forget."

When, finally, Abby and Floretta had run back, and spied her there,
they had stared half frightened. "You ain't sick, are you, Ellen?"
asked Abby, anxiously.

"What are you sitting there for?" asked Floretta.

Ellen had replied that she was not sick, and had risen and run on,
looking for flowers, but the flowers for her bloomed always against
a background of the past, and nodded with forward flings of
fragrance into the future; for the other children, who were wholly
of their own day and generation, they bloomed in the simple light of
their own desire of possession. They picked only flowers, but Ellen
picked thoughts, and they kept casting bewildered side-glances at
her, for the look which had come into her eyes as she sat beneath
the pine-tree lingered.

It was as if a rose had a second of self-consciousness between the
bud and the blossom; a bird between its mother's brooding and the
song. She had caught sight of the innermost processes of things, of
her wheels of life.

Ellen waked up on that June morning, and the old sensation of a
pause before advance was upon her, and the strange solemnity which
was almost a terror, from the feeble clutching of her mind at the
comprehension of infinity. She looked at the morning sunlight coming
between the white slants of