hat and
taken off her apron. She carried a little oblong basket with a cover,
and this she set carefully in the back of the wagon, with the lilies.
Jerry alighted gallantly to help her in, and when he had started up the
horse it was Marietta who began speaking. Usually she was rather silent,
following Jerry's lead, but to-day the warmth and beauty and song had
liberated something in her spirit, and she had to talk back to the
talking earth.

"You know Ferny Woods are much as a mile this side of the Moodys'," she
was saying. "You can just leave me there, and then you can go along and
make your call."

"It seems pretty mean not to take you with me," Jerry offered haltingly.
Yet he knew, as she did, that he had no desire to take her. This was his
own sacred pilgrimage.

"Oh, I wouldn't go for anything," she answered eagerly. "You've looked
forward to it so long--well, not exactly that, for you didn't know she
was coming. But it means a good deal to you. And I don't care a mite. I
truly don't, not a mite."

Jerry flicked at the horse's ears and spoke out of his maze of dreamy
anticipation.

"Seems if I should know her the minute I put eyes on her."

"Well, I guess you will," she encouraged him. "Maybe she's the only
boarder they've got, so far."

"No, no, I don't mean that. Seems if I knew exactly how she ought to
look."

"How d' you think, Jerry?" she inquired confidentially, as if his
fancies were valuable and delightful to her. That was the tone she
always had for him. Jerry would have said, if he had needed to think
anything about it, that Marietta was the easiest person to talk to in
the whole world. But he never did think about it. She was a part of his
interchange with life, as real and as inevitable as his own hungers and
satisfactions.

"Well," he said, while the horse slackened into a walk, with the grade
of Blossom Hill, "I guess she's light-complexioned. Don't you?"

"Maybe," nodded Marietta kindly. "You can't tell."

"I guess she don't weigh very heavy," said Jerry, in a shamefaced
bluntness, as if he wronged the absent goddess through such crudities.
"You can't seem to see anybody that's had the thoughts she has and the
way she's got of putting 'em--you can't see 'em very big-framed or
heavy, can you? I can't, anyways."

"No," said Marietta, looking down at her own plump hands folded on her
knee--"no, I don't know 's you can. Only see, Jerry! I always thought
this little rise was about the pr