nd you don't know why,
and you are just too happy to eat? I do."

He paused and looked into her bright, unformed face with the fleeting
cloud of sadness trailing its blind way across her heart.

"And say, Lila--why, this morning when I was out there all alone I just
sang at the top of my voice, I felt so bang-up dandy--and--I tell you
something--honest, I kept thinking of you all the time--you and the
hills and a dove's eyes. It just tasted good way down in me--you ever
feel that way?"

Again the girl danced her answer and sent the words she could not speak
through her eyes and his to his innermost consciousness.

"But honest, Lila--don't you ever feel that way--kind of creepy with
good feeling--tickledy and crawly, as though you'd swallowed a candy
caterpillar and was letting it go down slow--slow, slow, to get every
bit of it--say, honest, don't you? I do. It's just fine--out on the
prairie all alone with big bursting thoughts bumping you all the
time--gee!"

They were sitting on the steps when he finished and his heel was denting
the sod. She was entranced by what she saw in his eyes.

"Of course, Kenyon," she answered finally. "Girls are--oh, different, I
guess. I dream things like that, and sometimes mornings when I'm wiping
dishes I think 'em--and drop dishes--and whoopee! But I don't
know--girls are not so woozy and slazy inside them as boys. Kenyon, let
me tell you something: Girls pretend to be and aren't--not half; and
boys pretend they aren't and are--lots more."

She gazed up at him in an unblinking joy of adoration as shameless as
the heart of a violet baring itself to the sun. Then she shut her eyes
and the lad caught up his instrument and cried:

"Come on, Lila,--come in the house. I've got to play out
something--something I found out on the prairie to-day about 'mine eyes
unto the hills' and 'the eyes of the dove' and the woozy, fuzzy, happy,
creepy thoughts of you all the time."

He was inside the door with the violin in his hands. As she closed the
door he put his head down to the brown violin as if to hear it sing, and
whispered slowly:

"Oh, Lila--listen--just hear this."

And then it came! "The Spring Sun," it is known popularly. But in the
book of his collected music it appears as "Allegro in B." It is the
throb of joy of young life asking the unanswerable question of God: what
does it mean--this new, fair, wonderful world full of life and birth,
and joy; charged with mystery, envelop