ide her and folded her hands in her lap. The day
was so warm she had put on, for the first time that spring, her pink
muslin gown, which had served her for a matter of eight seasons, and
showed in stripes of brighter color around the skirt where the tucks
had been let out to accommodate her growth. Her pink skirts fluttered
around her as she sat there, smiling straight ahead out of the pink
scoop of a sunbonnet like her dress, with a curious sweet directness,
as if she saw some one whom she loved--as, indeed, she did. Elmira,
full of the innocent selfishness of youth, saw such a fair vision of
her own self clad in her mother's wedding silk, with loving and
approving eyes upon her, that she could but smile.

Elmira rested a few minutes, then gathered up her parcel and started
again on her way. She reached the place in the road where the brook
willows border it on either side, and on the east side the brook,
which is a river in earliest spring, flows with broken gurgles over a
stony bed, and slackened her pace, thinking she would walk leisurely
there, for the young willows screened the sun like green veils of
gossamer, and the wind did not press her back so hard, and then she
heard the trot, trot of a horse's feet behind her.

She did not look around, but walked more closely to the side of the
road and the splendid east file of willows. The trot, trot of the
horse's feet came nearer and nearer, and finally paused alongside of
her; then a man's voice, half timid, half gayly daring, called,
"Good-day, Miss Elmira Edwards!"

With that Elmira gave a great start, though not wholly of surprise;
for the imagination of a maid can, at the stimulus of a horse's feet,
encompass nearly all realities within her dreams. Then she looked up,
and Doctor Prescott's son Lawrence was bending over from his saddle
and smiling into her pink face in her pink sunbonnet.

"Good-day," she returned, softly, and courtesied with a dip of her
pink skirts into a white foam of little way-side weedy flowers, and
then held her pink sun-bonnet slanted downward, and would not look
again into the young man's eager face.

"It is a full year since I have seen you, and not a glimpse of your
face did I get this time, and yet I knew, the minute I came in sight
of you, who it was," said he, gayly; still, there was a loving and
wistful intonation in his voice.

"Small compliment to me," returned Elmira, with a pretty spirit,
though she kept her pink bonnet sl