DREAMS AND WAKINGS

The incomparable Lucy Tait was still but a star to be adored in her
distant heaven when I went away from Little Arcady to learn some things
not taught in the faded brick schoolhouse. It was six years before I
came back; six years that I lived in a crowded place where people had no
easy ways nor front yards with geranium beds, nor knew enough of their
neighbors either to love or to hate them.

I came back to the Little Country a mannish being, learned in the law,
and with the right sort of laugh in my heart for the old school days,
for the simplicity of my boy's love.

But, there and then, with her old sweet want of pity, did she smite me
again. Through and through she smote the man as she had smitten the boy.
Treacherously it was, within my own citadel, at the very moment of my
coming. Gayly up the remembered path I went, under the flowering
horse-chestnut, to the little house standing back from the street, only
to find that, as of old, she blocked my way. She stood where the
pink-blossomed climber streamed up the columns of the little porch, and
her arm was twined among the strands to draw them to her face. She was
leaving,--but she had stayed too long; not the child with yellow braids,
humorously preserved in my memory, but a blossomed, a fruiting Eve, with
whilom braids massed high in a coronet, their gold a little tarnished.
Later it came to me to think that she was Spring, and had filched a crown
from Autumn. In that first glance, however, I could only wonder
instinctively if the tassels yet danced from her boot tops. I saw at
once that this might not any longer be known. One could only surmise
pleasantly. But straightway was I Atlas, stooping a little, rounding my