"It's a dear!" she said heartily. "I wish I could make a picture like that."
"You've made one a thousand times better!" cried Laura Ann. "I saw it this afternoon."
"Me—make a picture?" Billy's voice was incredulous. "I couldn't draw my breath straight!"
"It was a beautiful one. I stood still and looked at it. Your background was fine, dear—woods banked against a late afternoon sky, with bits of red light straggling through the branches, a little box of a house in the foreground, with patches of new shingles on the 'cover'; a crooked little front path, a funny little well, a little rosebush all a flame of color—"
"Mercy!" Billy's little triangle of a face put on alarm. Was Laura Ann losing her mind?
"But that—all that—was only the setting. The heart of the picture, dear, was an old man marching up and down the path—did I say it was a moving picture? He was whistling a tune in a wheezy way, and keeping step to it grandly. Once he seemed to lose a few notes; then he went into a little box of a house, and I heard an organ—"
"Oh!" breathed Billy, assured of the other's sanity, "you mean Old '61 practicing! That's the way he does—he's learning to march through Georgia without the organ, but he misses a step or two sometimes. That was the picture, was it?"
"It was a beautiful one," Laura Ann said softly. "You needn't tell me you can't paint, Billy! That's the kind of pictures we shall find hanging in the Great Picture Gallery."
They walked on for a little in silence, with only the piping chorus of the little night creatures in their ears. The sweet, cool damp was in their faces.
"Here we are at Jane Cotton's Sam's," Billy whispered by and by, to break the spell. She could not have told why she whispered.