doorway, putting on her straw hat to go back to the post-office.

Miss Delia stood a moment irresolute, and then stepped to her side.
"Lucyet," she said, her voice trembling, "I don't understand it exactly.
It isn't like the poetry I've been used to. There are things in it that
I don't know what they mean. To be sure, that's so with all poetry that
we do like,"--the tears were in her eyes; it is not an easy thing to
disappoint one's best friend and to be conscious of it,--"but it isn't
like what I thought it was going to be, just about what we see out of
the window. But it's my fault, just as likely as not,"--she laid her
hand on Lucyet's arm,--"that's what I want to say; you mustn't take it
to heart--just 's likely 's not, it's my fault."

Miss Delia did not believe a word of what she was saying, which made it
difficult for her to articulate; but she was making a brave effort in
her sensitive loyalty.

"I know," said Lucyet, gently; "but I guess it isn't your fault;" and
she slipped out to the road on her way to the post-office. Miss Delia
went back, picked up the paper, and, seating herself at the window, she
read "Spring" all through again, word by word; then she laid it aside
again, shaking her head sadly.

Lucyet went quietly behind her little window. Her disappointment
amounted to actual physical pain. She found no comfort, as a wiser
person might have done, in certain of Miss Delia's expressions; she only
realized that her best friend and her most generous critic could find
nothing good in what she had done. Her duty this afternoon was only to
make up the mail for the down train; then her time was her own till the
next mail train came up at half-past five. At two o'clock she closed the
office again and started on a long walk. She longed for the comfort of
the solitary hillsides, where warm patches of sunlight lay at the foot
of ragged stone walls, and there were long stretches of plain and meadow
to be looked over, and rolling hills to comfort the soul. As she climbed
a hill just before the place where a weedy untravelled road turned off
from the highway leading between closely growing underbrush and stone
walls, where now and then a shy bird rustled suddenly and invisibly
among last year's dried leaves, she saw three countrymen standing by the
wayside and talking with as near an approach to earnestness as ever
visits the colloquies of the ordinary unemotional New Englander. One of
them held a copy of the "Da