other days wherein it seems that every mote must feel to the full its
sentient life, and its swelling towards development or fulfilment. On
a day like the latter, everything and everybody bestirs. The dust
motes spin in whirling columns, the gnats dance for their lives their
dance of death before the wayfarer. The gardeners and the
grave-diggers turn up the earth with energy, making the clods fly
like water. The rich play, or work that they may play, as do the
poor. Everybody is up and wide awake and doing. The earth and the
habitations thereof are rubbed, cleaned, and swept, or skylarked
over; the boy plays with his marbles on the sidewalk or whoops over
the fields; the housewives fling wide open their house windows, and
the dust of the winter flies out like smoke; the tradesmen set out
their new wares to public view, the bees make honey, the birds repeat
their world-old nesting songs, the cocks crow straight through the
day; nothing stops till the sun sets, and even then it is hard for
such an ardent clock of life to quite run down.

It was that spirit of unrest which had sent the two ladies out making
calls. There was not one where, if the womenkind were at home at all
and not afield, but they had been possessed of the spring activity,
until they reached the Ranger place, where the new-comers to
Banbridge lived. The Ranger place was, in some respects the most
imposing house in Banbridge. It stood well back from the road, in
grounds which deserved the name. They were extensive, dotted with
stately groups of spruces and pines, and there was in the rear of the
house a pond with a rustic bridge, fringed with willows, which gave
the place its name, "Willow Lake." The house had formerly been owned
by two maiden women with much sentiment, the sisters of the present
owner. The place was "Willow Lake." The pond was the "Willow Mere,"
in defiance of the name of the place. The little rustic bridge was