e is so much truth in it."
The people walking in the sunshine were all full of spring thoughts and
plans. The colours they wore, the flowers in the women's hats and the
men's buttonholes belonged to the season. The cheerful crowds of people
and carriages had a sort of rushing stir of movement which suggested
freshness. Later in the year everything looks more tired. Now things
were beginning and everyone was rather inclined to believe that this
year would be better than last. "Look at the shop windows," said Betty,
"full of whites and pinks and yellows and blues--the colours of hyacinth
and daffodil beds. It seems as if they insist that there never has been
a winter and never will be one. They insist that there never was and
never will be anything but spring."

"It's in the air." Lady Anstruthers' sigh was actually a happy one. "It
is just what I used to feel in April when we drove down Fifth Avenue."

Among the crowds of freshly-dressed passers-by, women with flowery hats
and light frocks and parasols, men with touches of flower-colour on the
lapels of their coats, and the holiday look in their faces, she noted so
many of a familiar type that she began to look for and try to pick them
out with quite excited interest.

"I believe that woman is an American," she would say. "That girl looks
as if she were a New Yorker," again. "That man's face looks as if it
belonged to Broadway. Oh, Betty! do you think I am right? I should say
those girls getting out of the hansom to go into Burnham & Staples' came
from out West and are going to buy thousands of things. Don't they look
like it?"

She began to lean forward and look on at things with an interest so
unlike her Stornham listlessness that Betty's heart was moved.

Her face looked alive, and little waves of colour rose under her skin.
Several times she laughed the natural little laugh of her girlhood which
it had seemed almost too much to expect to hear again. The first of
these laughs came when she counted her tenth American, a tall Westerner
of the cartoon type, sauntering along with an expression of speculative
enjoyment on his odd face, and evidently, though furtively, chewing
tobacco.

"I absolutely love him, Betty," she cried. "You couldn't mistake him for
anything else."

"No," answered Betty, feeling that she loved him herself, "not if you
found him embalmed in the Pyramids."

They pleased themselves immensely, trying to guess what he would buy
and take home t