ut the flowers and carry them to Ruth Bellair. He would
know, and the poetess also, what wonderful thing to say about anything
so lovely, all in measured lines rhyming to perfection. She sighed once
or twice when her head was on the pillow. It seemed amazing to her to be
gifted as Jerry and his poetess were, and very stupid to be as dull as
she.

Jerry, that night, hardly slept at all. He sat by his hearth, fiddle in
hand, sometimes caressingly under his chin, sometimes lying across his
knees; but he was not playing. He had opened both windows, so that,
although the spring air was cool, he could get the feeling of the night
and hurry the beating of his excited heart. Jerry was in no habit of
remembering how old he was, and to-night age seemed infinitely removed.
He was thinking of poetry and of Ruth Bellair. She had always been what
he called his guiding star. Once he wrote a set of verses by that title,
and put under it, with a hand trembling at its own audacity, "To R. B."
That had never been published, but he had read it to Marietta, and she
had said it was beautiful. Ruth Bellair had always seemed very far above
him, for although he wrote poetry the county paper accepted in
prodigious quantities, she did verse of a sort that appeared in loftier
journals. She had written "The Hole in the Baby's Shoe," which mothers
had cut out and pinned on the window curtain, and children had spoken on
Last Day, to the accompaniment of tears from assembled parents. Then
there was her sonnet, "Shall I Meet Thee There?" which Jerry had always
supposed to have been inspired by a departed lover, and many, many
others that touched the heart and were easy to remember, they ran so
steadily, with such a constant beat. Jerry knew exactly how she would
look. She would have golden hair and blue eyes, and what she had called
in one of her poems the "tender gift of tears." He had always, in fancy,
seen her dressed in blue, because that was his favorite color, though he
reflected that he might as easily find her clad in white.

It was only toward morning that he slept, his fiddle on the table now,
but very near, as if they had shared a solemn vigil and it still knew
how he might feel in dreams.

It was about ten o'clock when he stopped at Marietta's gate with the
light wagon and sober white horse he had borrowed from Lote Purington,
"down the road." Marietta was ready at the door, a long white box in her
hand.

"I been watching for you," she