and pink. So he took his lilies
in his hand and strode away, and Marietta watched him. At the turn of
the road he stopped and waved his hand to her.

"Good-by!" called Marietta. "Good luck! Good-by!" Then a little sob
choked her, and she stamped her foot. "What a fool!" said Marietta,
addressing herself, and she walked to the bars with great determination,
let down one, "scooched" to go through, and, picking up her basket, went
on to the amphitheatre. Jerry need not have wondered whether she
remembered his ornate poem. She did, every word of it, and as she walked
she said it to herself in a murmuring tone. When she was within the
beloved inclosure she paused a moment before setting down her basket,
and looked about her. The place was not so grand as her childish eyes
had found it, only a great semicircle of ground brown with pine needles
and surrounded by ancient trees; but it was beautiful enough. Strangely,
she had not visited it for years. Her own mates no longer came, because
they were doing quiet things at home, farming and household tasks, and
Marietta would have had no mind, if she had been invited, to make one of
a serious middle-aged rout taking its annual pleasure with a difference.

"I'd rather by half be alone," she said aloud, as she looked about her,
"or maybe with one other that feels as I do."

Then she put down her basket and went, by a path she knew, to the spring
cleaned of fallen leaves by the first picnickers of every season. There
it was, the little kind pool with its bottom of sand and its fringing
grasses, the cress she had planted once with her own hands and now
beginning to show brightly green. Marietta knelt and drank from her
hollowed palm. The cup was in the basket. When Jerry came back he should
have it to slake his thirst; and presently she returned to the
amphitheatre and lay down on the pine-needles, to look up through the
boughs at glints of sky, and think and think. Perhaps it was not
thought, after all. It followed no road, but stayed an instant on a pine
bough, as a bird alights and then flies out through the upper branches
to the sky itself.

Marietta could not help feeling happy, in a still, unreasoning way. She
had not had an easy youth. It had been full of poverty and fears, and
her later life had been lived on one monotonous level of satisfying her
own bare wants and finding nothing left for luxury. But something, some
singing inner voice, was always, in these later days, bid