beautifully as she could. They wanted you to; they wanted it more than
anything because they were so beautiful. So good. So wise.

But three years went before Harriett understood how wise they had been,
and why her mother took her again and again into Black's Lane to pick red
campion, so that it was always the red campion she remembered. They must
have known all the time about Black's Lane; Annie, the housemaid, used to
say it was a bad place; something had happened to a little girl there.
Annie hushed and reddened and wouldn't tell you what it was. Then one day,
when she was thirteen, standing by the apple tree, Connie Hancock told
her. A secret... Behind the dirty blue palings... She shut her eyes,
squeezing the lids down, frightened. But when she thought of the lane she
could see nothing but the green banks, the three tall elms, and the red
campion pricking through the white froth of the cow's parsley; her mother
stood on the garden walk in her wide, swinging gown; she was holding the
red and white flowers up to her face and saying, "Look, how
_beautiful_ they are."

She saw her all the time while Connie was telling her the secret. She
wanted to get up and go to her. Connie knew what it meant when you
stiffened suddenly and made yourself tall and cold and silent. The cold
silence would frighten her and she would go away. Then, Harriett thought,
she could get back to her mother and Longfellow.

Every afternoon, through the hours before her father came home, she sat in
the cool, green-lighted drawing-room reading _Evangeline_ aloud to
her mother. When they came to the beautiful places they looked at each
other and smiled.

She passed through her fourteenth year sedately, to the sound of