the romance.

For it was romance, romance of the sort she had dreamed of and planned
for and got herself ready to be equal to, if ever it should come.
Somehow, she had always known it would come. She could hardly go back to
the time when she did not have this premonition of a lover who would
appear like a prince in a fairy-tale and lift her out of her low estate.

And he had come. He had come late on an afternoon in the preceding
summer, when she was picking wild raspberries in the wood above Duck
Rock. It was a lonely spot in which she could reasonably have expected
to be undisturbed. She was picking the berries fast and deftly, because
the fruitman who passed in the morning would give her a dollar for her
harvest. Was it the dollar, or was it the sweet, wandering, summer air?
Was it the mingled perfumes of vine and fruit and soft loam loosened as
she crept among the brambles, or was it the shimmer of the waning
sunlight or the whir of the wings of birds or the note of a
hermit-thrush in some still depth of the woodland ever so far away? Or
was it only because she was young and invincibly happy at times, in
spite of a sore heart, that she sang to herself as her nimble fingers
secured the juicy, delicate red things and dropped them into the pan?

He came like Pan, or a faun, or any other woodland thing, with no sound
of his approach, not even that of oaten pipes. When she raised her eyes
he was standing in a patch of bracken. She had been stooping to gather
the fruit that clustered on a long, low, spiny stem. The words on her
lips had been:

At least be pity to me shown
If love it may na be--

but her voice trailed away faintly on the last syllable, for on looking
up he was before her. He wore white flannels, and a Panama hat of which
the brim was roguishly pulled down in front to shade his eyes.

He was smiling unabashed, and yet with a friendliness that made it
impossible for her to take offense. "Isn't it Rosie?" he asked, without
moving from where he stood in the patch of trampled bracken. "I'm
Claude. Don't you remember me?"

A Delphic nymph who had been addressed by Apollo, in the seclusion of
some sacred grove, could hardly have felt more joyous or more dumb.
Rosie Fay did not know in what kind of words to answer the glistening
being who had spoken to her with this fine familiarity. Later, in the
silence of the night, she blushed with shame to think of the figure she
must have cut, standing spe