n the turnpike.

"You love him, but you don't love him enough, honey," said Reuben,
patting her head. "You love yourself still better than him."

"Three months ago he hardly dared hope for me--he would have kissed the
dust under my feet--and now he flies into fits of jealousy because I
dance with another man."

"'Tis human natur to go by leaps an' starts in love, Molly."

"It's a foolish way, grandfather."

"Well, I ain't claimin' that we're over-wise, but thar's al'ays life
ready to teach us."

When the snow thawed, spring appeared so suddenly that it looked as
if it had lain there all winter in a green and gold powder over the
meadows. Flashes of blue, like bits of fallen sky, showed from the
rail fences; and the notes of robins fluted up from the budding willows
beside the brook. On the hill behind Reuben Merryweather's cottage the
peach-trees bloomed, and red-bud and dogwood filled the grey woods with
clouds of delicate colour. Spring, which germinated in the earth, moved
also, with a strange restlessness, in the hearts of men and women. As
the weeks passed, that inextinguishable hope, which mounts always with
the rising sap, looked from their faces.

On the morning of her birthday, a warm April day, Molly smiled at
herself in the mirror, and because the dimples became her, wondered how
she could manage to keep on smiling forever. Blushing and paling she
tried a ribbon on her hair, threw it aside, and picked up another.

"I am thankful for many things," she was thinking, "and most of all I
am thankful that I am pretty. I suppose it's better to be good like Judy
Hatch, but I'd rather be pretty."

She was at the age when the forces of character still lie dormant, and
an accident may determine the direction of their future development.
It is the age when it is possible for fortune to make a dare-devil of a
philosopher, a sceptic of a worshipper, a cynic of a sentimentalist.

When she went down the flagged walk a little later to meet Abel by the
blazed pine as she had promised, she was still smiling to herself and
to the blue birds that sang joyously in the blossoming trees in the
orchard. At the end of the walk her smile vanished for she came face to
face with Jim Halloween, who carried a new-born lamb in his arms.

"Many happy returns of the day," he began with emotion. "I thought a
present like this would be the most acceptable thing I could bring to
you--an' ma agreed with me when I asked her advice."