ng him a large quantity of very inferior soap in order
that her friends, the Simpsons, might possess a premium in the shape of
a greatly needed banquet lamp, she had riveted his attention. He thought
all the time that he enjoyed talking with her more than with any woman
alive, and he had never changed his opinion. She always caught what
he said as if it were a ball tossed to her, and sometimes her mind, as
through it his thoughts came back to him, seemed like a prism which had
dyed them with deeper colors.

Adam Ladd always called Rebecca in his heart his little Spring. His
boyhood had been lonely and unhappy. That was the part of life he had
missed, and although it was the full summer of success and prosperity
with him now, he found his lost youth only in her.

She was to him--how shall I describe it?

Do you remember an early day in May with budding leaf, warm earth,
tremulous air, and changing, willful sky--how new it seemed? How fresh
and joyous beyond all explaining?

Have you lain with half-closed eyes where the flickering of sunlight
through young leaves, the song of birds and brook and the fragrance of
wild flowers combined to charm your senses, and you felt the sweetness
and grace of nature as never before?

Rebecca was springtide to Adam's thirsty heart. She was blithe youth
incarnate; she was music--an Aeolian harp that every passing breeze
woke to some whispering little tune; she was a changing, iridescent
joy-bubble; she was the shadow of a leaf dancing across a dusty floor.
No bough of his thought could be so bare but she somehow built a nest in
it and evoked life where none was before.

And Rebecca herself?

She had been quite unconscious of all this until very lately, and even
now she was but half awakened; searching among her childish instincts
and her girlish dreams for some Ariadne thread that should guide her
safely through the labyrinth of her new sensations.

For the moment she was absorbed, or thought she was, in the little love
story of Abijah and Emma Jane, but in reality, had she realized it, that
love story served chiefly as a basis of comparison for a possible one of
her own, later on.

She liked and respected Abijah Flagg, and loving Emma Jane was a habit
contracted early in life; but everything that they did or said, or
thought or wrote, or hoped or feared, seemed so inadequate, so painfully
short of what might be done or said, or thought or written, or hoped or
feared, under eas