s and out to
the sky beyond.

"Thinking about home?" Dick asked, and she nodded and smiled.

"Let's visit the garden," she suggested, when having rowed the length of
the lake they returned to the landing.

There was a riot of flowers in the great stretches of the formal garden,
but the girl leading, they made their way to the pansy beds. Deep,
velvety purple blossoms nodded up at them; soft blues and lavenders,
streaked with deeper blue and purple, touched plants of glowing yellow.
Hertha bent and began to talk to the nodding heads as though they were
children.

"They're more alive," she said to Dick, apologizing for her
childishness, "than any flowers I know."

He entered her conceit. "There's a lot of difference among them, though,
don't you think?" He bent over with her to look closely. "The blue ones
don't look like they were blue at all; but that dark lady down there,
for instance, she hasn't enjoyed her dinner. Perhaps last night she had
an overdose of dew."

"I'm afraid the expression is chronic," Hertha answered gravely.

They wandered on where bushes of spirea grew on either side the
path--"Bridal wreath, don't they call it?" Dick asked timidly--on among
the tall hickory and chestnut trees; then up the hill to the rose
garden, the green buds of the newly trimmed plants beginning to show
touches of color, and down again to the little valley where the
mischievous bronze baby, standing in the water surrounded by his guard
of spouting turtles, clutches a duck that pours out a constant stream of
sparkling drops into the pool below.

"How does any one think of such things?" Dick asked gazing with
admiration at the miniature fountain.

"It seems to me easy enough to think of them," Hertha answered. "But how
does any one make them?"

The sun was low as with reluctant feet they turned homeward. Dick had
been quiet, in touch with the beauty about him, the right companion for
a dreamlike afternoon. But the springtime had its present call to him,
and as they neared the end of their walk he could not forego a word.

They had come upon a sunny strip of path and Hertha, slipping off her
coat, threw it over her arm.

Dick took it from her. "Let me carry it, dear," he said.

It was the first time he had dared thus to speak to her, and his breath
came quick.

Awakening to find her dream was over, Hertha drew away from him.

"I know I have no right to say anything, Hertha," he went on, "I'm poor
still, but I c