uth and happiness and Nature's self at once.

Tom continually indulged in deep reflection on his charge after she was
twelve years old. She shot up into the tall suppleness of a lovely young
birch, and she was a sweetly glowing thing. A baby had been a different
matter; the baby had not been so difficult to manage; but when he found
himself day by day confronting the sweetness of child-womanhood in the
eyes that were gold-brown pools, and the softening grace of the fair
young body, he began to be conscious of something like alarm. He was not
at all sure what he ought to do at this crisis, and whether life
confining its experiences entirely to Talbot's Cross-roads was all that
was required.

"I don't know whether it's right, by thunder," he said. "I don't know
whether it's right; and that's what a man who's taken the place of a
young mother ought to know."

There came a Sunday when one of the occasional "preachings" was to be
held at the log-cabin church a few miles distant, and they were going
together, as they always did.

It was a heavenly, warm spring morning, and Sheba, having made herself
ready, wandered into the garden to wait among the flowers. The rapturous
first scents of the year were there, drawn by the sun and blown by
vagrant puffs of wind from hyacinths and jonquils, white narcissus and
blue violets. Sheba walked among the beds, every few minutes kneeling
down upon the grass to bury her face in pink and yellow and white
clusters, inhaling the breath of flowers and the pungent freshness of the
sweet brown earth at the same time. She had lived among leaves and
growing things until she felt herself in some unexplainable way a part of
the world they belonged to. The world beyond the mountains she knew
nothing of; but this world, which was the brown earth springing forth
into green blades and leaves and little streaked buds, warming into bloom
and sun-drenched fragrance, setting the birds singing and nest-building,
giving fruits and grain, and yellow and scarlet leaves, and folding
itself later in snow and winter sleep--this world she knew as well as she
knew herself. The birds were singing and nest-building this morning, and,
as she hung over a bed of purple and white hyacinths, kneeling on the
grass and getting as close to them as she could, their perfume mounted to
her brain and she began to kiss them.

"I love you," she said, dwelling on their sweet coolness with her lips;
"I love and love you!" And su