e
out her own necessity by constant "tending."

Bel did not go down-stairs again. She could do better here than with
Kate sitting opposite, aware of all her scratches and poetical
predicaments.

An hour went by. Bel was hardly equal yet to five-minute Crambo; and
besides, she was doing her best; trying to put something clearly
into syllables that said itself, unsyllabled, to her.

She did not hear Mrs. Scherman when she came up the stairs. She had
just read over to herself the five completed stanzas of her poem.

It had really come. It was as if a violet had been born to actual
bloom from the thought, the intangible vision of one. She wondered
at the phrasing, marveling how those particular words had come and
ranged themselves at her call. She did not know how she had done it,
or whether she herself had done it at all. She began almost to think
she must have read it before somewhere. Had she just picked it up
out of her memory? Was it a borrowing, a mimicry, a patchwork?

But it was very pretty, very sweet! It told her own feelings over to
her, with more that she had not known she had felt or perceived.
She read it again from beginning to end in a whisper. Her mouth was
bright with a smile and her eyes with tears when she had ended.

Asenath Scherman with her light step came in and stood beside her.

"Won't you tell _me_?" the sweet, gracious voice demanded.

Bel Bree looked up.

"I thought I'd try, in fun," she said, "and it came in real
earnest."

Asenath forgot that the face turned up to hers, with the smile and
the tears and the color in it, was the face of her hired servant. A
lovely soul, all alight with thought and gladness, met her through
it.

She bent down and touched Bel's forehead with her lady-lips.

Bel put the little scribbled paper in her hand, and ran away,
up-stairs.

"Will you give it to me, Bel, and let me do what I please with
it?"--Mrs. Scherman went to Bel and asked next day.

Bel blushed. She had been a little frightened in the morning to
think of what had happened over night. She could not quite recollect
all the words of her verses, and she wondered if they were really as
pretty as she had fancied in the moment of making them.

All she could answer was that Mrs. Scherman was "very kind."

"Then you'll trust me?"

And Bel, wondering very much, but too shy to question, said she
would.

A few days after that, Asenath called her up-stairs. The postman had
rung five minutes