zing up into the
green dappled shadows, now pausing on the brink to watch the water as
it swirled by her feet, smooth and deep and flawed in its depths with
arrow-lights of sunshine.

She came by and by to a point where the cart-track turned inland to
climb the woods and a foot-path branched off from it, skirting a
small recess in the shore. A streamlet of clear water, hurrying down
from the upland by the Devil's Hedge, here leapt the low cliff and
fell on a pebbly beach, driving the pebbles before it and by their
attrition wearing out for itself a natural basin. Encountering a low
ridge of rock on the edge of the tideway, the stones heaped
themselves along it and formed a bar, with one tiny outlet through
which the pool trickled continually, except at high spring tides when
the river overflowed it.

Now Miss Marty, fetching a compass around this miniature creek, came
in due course to the stream and seated herself on a fallen log, to
consider. For the ground on the farther side appeared green and
plashy, and she disliked wetting her shoes.

Overhead a finch piped. Below her, hidden by a screen of hazel,
chattered the fall. Why should she wend farther? She must be greedy
of solitude indeed if this sylvan corner did not content her.

And yet. . . . High on the opposite bank there grew a cluster of
columbine, purple and rosy pink, blown thither and seeded perhaps
from some near garden, though she had heard that the flower grew wild
in these woods. Miss Marty gazed at the flowers, which seem to nod
and beckon; then at the stream; then at the plashy shore; lastly at
her shoes. Her hand went down to her right foot.

She drew off her shoes. Then she drew off her stockings.

By this time she was in a nervous flurry. Almost you may say that
she raced across the stream and clutched at a handful of the
columbines. In less than a minute she was back again, gazing
timorously about her.

No one had seen; nobody, that is to say, except the finch, and he
piped on cavalierly. Miss Marty glanced up at him, then at a
clearing of green turf underneath his bough, a little to her left.
Why not? Why should she omit any of May morning's rites?

Miss Marty picked up her skirts again, stepped on to the green turf,
and began to dabble her feet in the dew.

"The morn that May began,
I dabbled in the dew;
And I wished for me a proper young man
In coat-tails of the blue. . . ."

"_Whoop! Whoo-oop