Jerry nodded. They both had a vision of the poet going on foot to the lady of his dreams, his lilies in his hand. Marietta lifted the cover of the box and unrolled them deftly. She looked about her for an instant, and then, finding feasible standing-ground, went to one of the runnels dripping down the cliff and paused there, holding the lily stems in the cool laving of the fall. Jerry, the horse tied, stood watching her and waiting. The bright blue of her dress shone softly against the wet brown and black of the cliff wall, and the pink of her cheeks glowed above it like a rosy light. Marietta had thought her dress far too gay when she bought it, but the dusk of the ravine road had toned it down to a tint the picture needed for full harmony. Jerry, though the familiar spot and her presence in it soothed and pleased him, was running ahead with his eager mind to the farm where Ruth Bellair stood waiting at the gate. Of course she was not really waiting for him, because she did not know he was coming, nor even that he lived at all. When he had mailed her the package of autumn leaves Marietta had pressed, he had not sent his name with them. Yet it seemed to him appropriate that she should be standing, a girlish figure, by the Moodys' gate, to let him in. After that they would walk up the path together, she carrying the lilies; and perhaps in the orchard, where the trees were in bloom, they would pace back and forth together and talk and talk. Jerry knew it was too early for apple-trees to be blossoming, even in this weather, but the orchard where Ruth Bellair walked would be white and pink. So he took his lilies in his hand and strode away, and Marietta watched him. At the turn of the road he stopped and waved his hand to her.
"Good-by!" called Marietta. "Good luck! Good-by!" Then a little sob choked her, and she stamped her foot. "What a fool!" said Marietta, addressing herself, and she walked to the bars with great determination, let down one, "scooched" to go through, and, picking up her basket, went on to the amphitheatre. Jerry need not have wondered whether she remembered his ornate poem. She did, every word of it, and as she walked she said it to herself in a murmuring tone. When she was within the beloved inclosure she paused a moment before setting down her basket, and looked about her. The place was not so grand as her childish eyes had found it, only a great semicircle of ground brown with pine needles and surrounded by ancient trees; but it was beautiful enough. Strangely, she had not visited it for years. Her own mates no longer came, because they were doing quiet things at home, farming and household tasks, and Marietta would have had no mind, if she had been invited, to make one of a serious middle-aged rout taking its annual pleasure with a difference.
"I'd rather by half be alone," she said aloud, as she looked about her, "or maybe with one other that feels as I do."
Then she put down her basket and went, by a path she knew, to the spring cleaned of fallen leaves by the first picnickers of every season. There it was, the little kind pool with its bottom of sand and its fringing grasses, the cress she had planted once with her own hands and now beginning to show brightly green. Marietta knelt and drank from her hollowed palm. The cup was in the basket. When Jerry came back he should have it to slake his thirst; and presently she returned to the amphitheatre and lay down on the pine-needles, to look up through the boughs at glints of sky, and think and think. Perhaps it was not thought, after all. It followed no road, but stayed an instant on a pine bough, as a bird alights and then flies out through the upper branches to the sky itself.
Marietta could not help feeling happy, in a still, unreasoning way. She had not had an easy youth. It had been full of poverty and fears, and her later life had been lived on one monotonous level of satisfying her own bare wants and finding nothing left for luxury. But something, some singing inner voice, was always, in these later days, bidding her take hope. She was not expectant of definite delights; she only cherished an irresponsible certainty. When the door opened to let in spring, it seemed to show her heaven also, and she gave herself up to the gladness of it. If Marietta had been able to scrutinize her inner being, she would probably have owned that she found Jerry Freelands' influence upon her a great and guiding one. It was, she knew, a precious privilege to know a poet, and to see the natural and spiritual worlds through his discerning eyes. It would have seemed to her wonderful to be a poet herself. Ruth Bellair, waiting in unconscious sovereignty for Jerry to seek her out and lay lilies at her feet, was, she knew, the happiest woman in the spring world. Yet the soft air moved the pines to wavelike murmurings, and Marietta too was happy.
It was nearly three o'clock when Jerry came back, and before that Marietta had roused herself to open her basket and spread a napkin on the big flat stone that made the picnic-table. She had laid a pile of fine white bread and butter on the cloth, a paper twist of pickles, because picnickers, according to tradition, are the better for consuming pickles, and some of her own superior sugar gingerbread. The cup was there waiting for Jerry to take it to the spring. Then she listened for him. He did not give the expected coot, but came through the forest glade silently and with a halting step. When Marietta saw him her heart ran forward, before her feet. Jerry looked an older man; his years were so apparent to her that it seemed for a foolish instant as if his father were advancing toward her out of the past where she and Jerry had been young together. She hurried forward.
"What is it?" she besought. "What's happened?"
His dull eyes turned upon her absently. He took off his hat and dropped it at his feet.
"Why," said he, "nothing's happened that I know of."
The part of prudence was to halt, but anxiety hurried her on as if it might have been to the rescue of a child in pain.