The next morning I did not urge Miss Goodwin to come to the farm. In fact, I urged her to sit in the sun and rest. It was a glorious day, a real June day, though June was not due till the following Wednesday. It was Sunday, the Sunday preceding Memorial Day. But, as my farm was so far from the centre of the village, and my lawn was so screened from the roads by the house on one side and the pines and maples on the other, I resolved to hazard my reputation and go at my lawn, which the rain at last had settled. I hitched the horse to my improvised drag and smoothed it again, several times, in default of a roller. Then I led the horse back to the barn.

As I came to the barn door again, a carryall was passing, with a woman and a stout girl on the back seat, and another stout girl and a man on the front seat. The women were dressed in their starched best, the man, an elderly farmer with a white beard, in the blue uniform and slouch hat of the G. A. R. They were going to Memorial service. I instinctively saluted as the old fellow nodded to me in his friendly, country way, and he dropped the reins with a pleased smile and brought his own hand snap up to his hat brim. I watched the carryall disappear, hearing it rattle over the bridge across my brook, and for the first time felt myself a stranger in this community. I suddenly wanted to go with them to church, to hear the drone of the organ and the soft wind rushing by the open windows, bringing in the scent of lilacs, to see the faces of my neighbours about me, to chat with them on the church steps when the service was over. I realized how absorbed I had been in my own little farm, and resolved to begin getting acquainted with the town as soon as possible. Then I picked up a rake, and went back to the lawn.

As soon as I had eliminated the horse's hoofprints, I got a bag of lawn seed and scattered it, probably using a good deal more than was necessary. Mike had assured me it was too late to sow grass, but I hoped for fool's luck. I sowed it carefully about the sundial beds, so that none should fall on them, but over the rest of the lawn I let it fall from on high, delighting in the way it drifted with the gentle wind on its drop to earth. I had not sown long before the birds began to come, by ones, then by twos and threes and fours, till it seemed as if fifty of them were hopping about. I shooed them away, but back they came.

"Well," thought I, "lawn seed is not so terribly expensive, and they can't pick it all up!" I scattered it thicker than ever, and then harrowed it under a little with a rake, working till one o'clock, for Sunday dinner was at one-thirty. Then I went back to Bert's, with only a peep into my big south room to see how cheerful it looked. I found Miss Goodwin still sitting where I had left her, under the sycamore before the house.

"You see, I've obeyed," she smiled. "I've not read, nor even thought. I've 'jest set.' But I'm beginning to get restless."

"Good," said I. "Shall we celebrate the Sabbath by taking a walk? I'd like to have you show me Bentford."

She assented, and right after dinner we set out, I having donned my knickerbockers and a collar for the first time since my arrival, and feeling no little discomfort from the starched band around my throat.

"The size of it is," I groaned, "all my clothes are now too small for me. If you stay here till July, you'll probably have to send for an entire new wardrobe."

"That's the fear which haunts me," she smiled, as we crossed my brook and turned up the hill toward the first of the big estates. In front of this estate we paused and peeped through the hedge. The family had evidently arrived, for the unmistakable sounds of a pianola were issuing from the house. The great formal garden, still gay with Darwin tulips and beginning to show banks of iris flowers against lilac shrubbery, looked extremely expensive. The residence itself, of brown stucco, closely resembled a sublimated $100,000 ice-house. An expensive motor stood before the door.

"How rich and ugly it is," said Miss Goodwin, turning away. "Let's not look at houses. Let's find some woods to walk in."

We looked about us toward the high hills which ring the Bentford valley, and struck off toward what seemed the nearest. The side road we were on soon brought us to the main highway up the valley to the next town, and a motor whizzed past us, leaving a cloud of dust, then a second, and a third. We got off the highway as speedily as possible, crossing a farm pasture and entering the timber on the first slope of the big hill. Here a wood road led up, and we loitered along it, finding late violets and great clumps of red trilliums here and there.

The girl sprang upon the first violets with a little cry of joy, picking them eagerly and pressing them to her nose. "Smell!" she laughed, holding them up to mine. She soon had her hands full, and was forced to pass by the next bed — as I told her, with the regret of a child who has eaten all the cake he can at a church supper.

"No child ever ate all the cake he could," she laughed. "Oh, please dig up some trilliums and plant them in your garden, or rather in your woods!"

"How are we going to get them home?" said I. "We'll have to dig up some of the earth, too, with the roots."

"I know," she answered. "Even if I am a highbrow, I've not quite forgotten my childhood lessons in manual work — which I always hated till now. I'll weave a basket."

Looking about, I saw a wild grape vine, and I pulled it down from the tree to which it was clinging. "I feel like a suffragette," said I, "destroying the clinging vine."

"Cut it into two-foot lengths," she retorted, "and don't make poor puns." She sat on the brown needles at the foot of a pine, and began twisting the pieces of vine into a rough basket. I sat beside her and watched her work. Out beyond us was a sun-soaked clearing, a tiny swamp on the hillside, and the sunlight dappled in across her skirt. As she worked, a wood thrush called far off, his last long-drawn note ringing like a sweet, wistful fairy horn. The white fingers paused in their weaving, and our eyes met. She did not speak, but looked smiling into my face as the call was repeated, while her throat fluttered. Then, without speaking, she turned back to her work. I, too, was silent. What need was there of words?

"Was that a hermit, too?" she asked presently. "It sounded different."

"No, a wood thrush," said I. "He's not so Mozartian."

She finished the basket and held it out proudly. "There!" she cried. "It isn't pretty, and it isn't art, but it will hold trilliums."

She dusted off her skirt, and I helped her to her feet. We continued up the road, looking for trilliums, and when the first large clump appeared pushing up their dark red blooms from the leafy mould, we were both on our knees beside it, prying it up, earth and all. We soon had the basket filled, and then pressed on straight up the hillside, leaving the wood road. It was a steep scramble, over rocks where the thin, mossy soil slipped from under foot, and through tangles of mountain laurel bushes. I had frequently to help her, for she was not used to climbing, and she was breathing hard.

"Let's stop," said I. "This is too hard work for you."

She grasped a dead stick, like a banner staff, struck an attitude, and cried, "Excelsior!"

"No, sir," she added, "I'm going to reach the top of this hill and look down the other side if I die on the summit. I know now for the first time why Annie Peck and Hudson Stuck risked their lives on Mount Something-or-other in the Andes and Mount McKinley in Alaska. It's a grand sensation. I feel the primal urge!"

"Didn't you ever climb a mountain?" I queried, incredulous.

"Never," she answered. "Never even a baby mountain like this. My altitude record is the top step of the Columbia University library."

"You poor child!" I cried. "Why, I'll carry you to the top! I never realized that you were such a hopeless urbanite."

We went on more slowly, for the way was very steep now, and between helping her and holding the trilliums level I had my hands full. Laughing when we had the breath, we scrambled through the last of the shrubbery, and suddenly stood on a flat rock at the summit, with the world spread out below us like a map. I set down the basket, wiped my face, and ruefully felt of my wilted collar. The girl sank, panting, on the rock, fanned herself with her wisp of a handkerchief, and gazed out over the green Bentford valley below to the far hills in the south. The sky above us was very blue and lazy afternoon clouds were floating in it. Far up here only a few birds peeped in the scrub. We seemed strangely alone in that privacy of the peak.

"'Silent upon a peak in Darien!'" I heard her say, as if to herself. Then she turned her eager face to mine. "Isn't it wonderful!" she cried. "Look, all the world like a map below you, and all this sky to see at once, and the cooling breeze and the feeling that you are above everybody! Oh, I love it! Quick, now let me see the other side!"

She ran across the rock, and I after her. From this side we looked between the trees into the valley to the north, the next valley to Bentford, and saw a blue lake, like a piece of the sky dropped down, and several large estates, and the green and brown checkerboards of farms, and far off a white steeple above the trees, and then once more on the horizon the eternal ring of blue mountains. Even as we gazed, from somewhere below us drifted up, faint and sweet, the sound of a church bell.

"Oh, it is nice on the roof of the world!" she cried. "Think of that — here am I, a Ph. D. in philology, and the only adjective I can find is 'nice'!"

"It's all in how you say it," I smiled. "I think I understand. I called you 'poor child' a few moments ago because you'd never been on a high hilltop. Now I take it back. Think of getting those first virgin impressions when you are old enough to appreciate them! I envy you. I was only five when they took me up Mount Washington."

"I should think you'd have insisted on the Matterhorn by the time you were ten," she laughed. "I should."

We hunted out some soft moss in the shade, and sat down to get cool in the summit breeze before the descent. The girl spoke little, her eyes wandering constantly off over the view with the light of discovery in them. In my own staid way, I had always fancied I enjoyed the quieter pleasures of the outdoors as much as any one, but before this rapture I was almost abashed. If I did not speak, it was chiefly because I feared to drop clumsy words into her mood.

But presently I did suggest that we must be starting down. As there was no path visible — later I have found that since the advent of motors there are never any paths where the walking is in the least strenuous! — we took the way we had come, and began the descent. Naturally I went ahead, and helped her all I could. To one unaccustomed to hard walking, a steep descent is more tiresome than a climb, and I began to fear that I had led her into an excess. But she came bravely tumbling along behind. In some places I had to put up my arms and lift her down. In others she had to slide one foot far ahead for a secure resting-place, with a reckless show of stocking. But she laughed it all off gayly. We missed, somehow, the way we had taken up, and presently found ourselves on a ledge with a clean drop of eight feet. I prospected to right and left, found a place where the drop was only six, and jumped. Then she lowered the basket to me, sat on the edge herself, leaned out and put her arms about my neck, and I swung her off. As I set her on the ground again our faces were close together for an instant, and I could feel rather than see her eyes laughing into mine.

"This is a very pleasant hill," said I.

"But we are almost to the wood road now," she darted back, jumping into the lead.

A moment more, and we stood in the wood road, and presently we came upon a spring under a rock, and plunged our faces into it and drank. She looked up with the water dripping from her saucy nose, and quoted: "'As rivers of water in a dry place.' I'm learning lots to-day. Now it's the elemental force of the Bible similes."

"All the wisdom isn't in New York — and dictionaries," said I.

"There, now you've mentioned the Dictionary! How could you!" she cried, and suddenly, like a child, snapped water into my face.

"You've ruined my collar," said I solemnly.

"Your collar looks like a fat man's at a dance in July," said she. "Let's give the poor trilliums a drink."

She put the basket by the spring, dipped her hands in the water, and then let palmsful drop on the wilted flowers. "How woodsy they smell!" she cried, leaning over them. "Now I'm going to wash my face again."

She was like a child. She buried her face in the water, and when she emerged the little curly hairs on her temples were dripping. "I'd like to wade in it!" she exclaimed. "I wonder if I dare!"

"Go ahead," said I. "I'll go down the road and wait."

"That wouldn't be daring," she twinkled.

"Well, I'll sit here and wait."

She looked at me saucily, and laughed, shaking her head.

"Coward," said I.

But she only laughed again, sprang up, and started rapidly away.

I caught her by the arm. "Easy, easy," I cautioned. "You're a broken-down, nervous wreck, remember. You mustn't overdo things."

Her moods were many that afternoon. Again she looked at me, but didn't laugh. Her eyes, instead, held a sort of startled gratitude, like those of a person, unused to kindness, suddenly befriended. She was no longer the child let loose in the woods. She walked slowly at my side, and so we came down to the high-road again. At the road we looked back to the hilltop where we had been.

"How much easier the climb looks than it is," said she.

"That's the way of hills — and other things," said I sententiously.

"I knew about the other things," she answered. "Now I've learned it about the hills. It seems as if I were learning all the old similes wrong end foremost, doesn't it? — springs and — and all?"

Her tone was wistful, and it was with difficulty that I refrained from touching her hand. "Oh, there's something to be said for that method," I answered cheerfully. "Think of all the pleasant things you have to learn. The other way around you get the grim realism last."

But a thought plagued her as we turned down the side road to my house. However, her face cleared as we drew near, and as the house itself appeared she clapped her hands, crying, "Now, where are we going to put the trilliums?"

"At the edge of the pines," I suggested, "where they can talk with the brook?"

"Yes, that's the place." Suddenly she paused, looked back up the slope, and cried, "Do you suppose this brook is that spring?"

I hastily ran over the contour of the country we had passed through, and saw that indeed the spring must be its headwaters.

"I'm so glad!" she cried.

"Why?" I asked.

She darted a look at me, with twinkling eyes. "I shan't tell you," she said.

I got a trowel, and we planted the withered trilliums in partial shade between the maples and the pines, and gave them water. Then I showed her the newly sown lawn, and we peeped in to see the Hiroshiges over the twin fires.

"Now, home and to bed for you," I cried. "I know you've done too much."

"I know I've had a wonderful time," she answered soberly. "I've — I've — it's hard to explain — but I've somehow connected up this house with the wild country about it. Do you understand? If I had a house in the country, I should want it where I could get out, this way, on a Sunday afternoon into the woods and bring home trilliums. It wouldn't seem right, complete, if I couldn't. I'd want my own dear garden, and then a great big, God's garden over the fence somewhere."

"That is how I feel, too," said I. "Only I want, also, to connect up my place with my neighbours; I want myself to be a part of the human environment. I thought of that this morning, as I saw the folks going by to church. If I ever get Twin Fires done, I'm going to join the Grange!"

"But Twin Fires comes first, doesn't it? I fear I've been selfish to drag you off to-day."

"Drag me off is good!" I laughed. "You poor little city-bred, you, as if your enjoyment hadn't given me the happiest day of my life! Only I'm afraid you did too much."

"I am pretty tired," she admitted, with a happy smile. "But I wouldn't have missed it for the world."

I was pretty tired myself, but I did a remarkably good evening's work, nevertheless, only pausing before the start to wonder why it was she wept one night when she wasn't tired, and smiled the next when she had tramped ten miles. But a man cannot afford to ponder such problems in feminine psychology too closely if he has anything else to do!