were wonderfully sweet if held a while in the closed hand; grape
arbors and shade and fruit trees, haunted by bees; winding walks
strewn fresh each spring with tan-bark that has such a clean,
strong odor, especially just after a rain, and that is at once
firm and soft beneath the feet. And in the midst stood the only
apricot tree in Saint X. As few of us had tasted apricots, and
as those few pronounced them better far than oranges or even
bananas, that tree was the climax of tantalization.

The place had belonged to a childless old couple who hated
children--or did they bar them out and drive them away because
the sight and sound of them quickened the ache of empty old age
into a pain too keen to bear? The husband died, the widow went
away to her old maid sister at Madison; and the Gardiners, coming
from Cincinnati to live in the town where Colonel Gardiner was
born and had spent his youth, bought the place. On our way to
and from school in the first weeks of that term, pausing as
always to gaze in through the iron gates of the drive, we had
each day seen Pauline walking alone among the flowers. And she
would stop and smile at us; but she was apparently too shy to
come to the gates; and we, with the memory of the cross old
couple awing us, dared not attempt to make friends with her.

She was eight years old, tall for her age, slender but strong,
naturally graceful. Her hazel eyes were always dancing
mischievously. She liked boys' games better than girls'. In her
second week she induced several of the more daring girls to go
with her to the pond below town and there engage in a raft-race
with the boys. And when John Dumont, seeing that the girls' raft
was about to win, thrust the one he was piloting into it and