o do with a peach."

"I went round behind the lilacs, where the lily bed is, and stood there
and cried like--like a water spout, I guess, and I kissed the peach. I
kissed it and kissed it. It was like a rough check. And then I buried it
among the lilies because the dirt there looked so soft."

"Did it come up?"

He wanted, though so late, to turn it into childish comedy. Nan laughed
out.

"No," she said ruefully, "not the way you'd expect. It did come up. I
saw her troweling there the next morning. She'd called me to bring her
other gardening gloves. She'd found a hole in one she had on. You know
how exquisitely she kept her hands. And just as I came, she turned up
the peach, and looked at it as if it had done something disgraceful to
get there, and tossed it into her basket."

"Now," said Raven, "you can't make me think anybody"--he couldn't allow
himself to say Aunt Anne--"went hunting out your poor little peach."

"No," said Nan, bending on him a limpid gaze. "Of course not,
consciously. Only there was something----" But even she, with all her
recklessness, could not follow this out. To her own consciousness was
the certainty that deep in Aunt Anne, deep as the principle of life
itself, was an intuition which led her will to the evidence it needed
for its own victories. "And the queer thing about it was," she ended, "I
didn't refuse to be confirmed because I doubted things. I refused
because I believed. I believed in God; I believed so hard I was afraid."

"What of?"

"Afraid of standing in with what I didn't like. Afraid I couldn't carry
it through, and if I didn't, there'd be ginger for me somewhere. So
queer, Rookie, like all the things that keep happening to us. Little
ironies, you know, that sort of thing. For she thought I was behaving
shockingly toward God. And really, Rookie, it was because I was so
afraid of Him. I believed in Him so much I couldn't say I believed in a
way I didn't."

"Like Old Crow," said Raven. "Only you didn't go far enough. You didn't
say it's only a symbol."

"I tried not to think much about it, anyway," she owned. "I couldn't
believe what she did. But I couldn't go into it. I can't now. Don't you
know, Rookie, there are things you can't talk about? It's bad manners."

"I wish the learned divines thought so," said Raven. "Dear Nan!" he
added, his mind returning to her. "I didn't know you so very well, after
all. I must have seen you were having a beast of a time, or I might