hem away, like fences before a
flood, allowing no obstructions to Youth's kinship with Spring. So the
young may not mourn long; so, if they do, they become no longer young.

The man and the woman might have been two care-free children for all
they were able to resist the magic of this fair morning or the subtler
magic of their own emotions.

To the man it suggested more than to the woman because he gave more
thought to it, but the woman absorbed more the spirit of it because she
more fully surrendered herself.

Donaldson found himself with a good appetite. There was nothing
neurotic about him. He was fundamentally normal--fundamentally
wholesome--with no trace of mawkishness in his nature. As he sipped
the hot golden-brown coffee, he tried to get at just what it was that
he felt when he now looked at her. It came to him suddenly and he
spoke it aloud,

"I seem to have, this minute, a fresher vision of life than I have
known since I was twenty."

It was something different from anything he had experienced up to now.
It was saner, clearer.

"It is the morning," she hazarded. "I never saw the grass so green as
it is this morning; I never felt the sun so warm."

"It is like the peace of the inner woods,--only brighter," he declared.

"You said such peace never came to any one unless alone."

"Did I?"

She nodded.

"But it _is_ like that," he insisted. "Only more joyous. I think it
is the extra joy in it that makes us not want it alone. Queer, too, it
seems to be born altogether of this spot, of this moment. Understand
what I mean? It does n't seem to go back of the moment we entered this
room and--," he hesitated, "it does n't seem to go forward."

"It is as though coming in here we had stepped into a beautiful picture
and were living inside the frame for a little," she suggested.

"Exactly. The frame is the hedge; the picture is the sky, the sun, and
you."

She laughed, frankly pleased in a childish way, at his conceit.

"Then for me," she answered, "it must be the sun, the sky, and _you_."

"We are n't trying to compliment each other, are we?"

"No," she answered seriously. "I hope not."

She went on after a moment's reflection,

"I have been puzzling over the strange chance that brought you into my
life at so opportune a time."

"I came because you believed in me and because you needed me. You
believed in me because--," he paused, his blood seeming suddenly to run
faster, "because