The orchard lay higher than the garden and the house. Rosamond went on up rustic steps, made of earth and roots, that led between irregular lines of pear trees weighted to the ground with their promise of brown and golden fruit. She made her way to a huge cherry tree, ran nimbly up the ladder, and covered the bottom of her basket with large, red-cheeked, white cherries; then, jumping down, she hastened on up the remaining steps into a small grass plot surrounding a tiny cottage. A beech tree took up its full share of the grounds and, close beside it, as if in friendly converse, rose the rustic, vine-clad top of a well with wet bucket hung high on the roller.
Mrs. Lee sat in a rocker beside the well, knitting. Her ball of yarn was filliping about the sward under the paws of a white kitten whose smudgy face betrayed a nature so obsessed with the entrancing amusements of a woollen tangle that the duty of the daily ablution was wholly forgotten.
“Oh, Mrs. Lee, I’m late; but here they are.” Rosamond held out her basket.
“Good-morning, Mrs. Mearely. How you spoil me, my dear! What lovely roses—oh, and dahlias!—dahlias of the very hue of life itself, the unquenchable crimson flame. How bravely and confidently they give themselves to the sun and blend with its rays! And cherries, too!”
Rosamond laughed.
“Now, Mrs. Lee, how can you pretend to feel such delighted surprise when you knew perfectly well that I’d bring them to-day just as I always do?”
“Ah, my dear, that is the very secret of happiness.” She paused to pick up a dropped stitch, and Rosamond, eager for data on this subject above all others, asked quickly:
“What is the secret of happiness?”
“Why—don’t you know? It is to anticipate only what you know will surely happen. Then your every desire comes to pass. And the surprise you feel is not so much surprise, after all, as a kind of charmed wonder that life is so beautifully arranged.”
“Is life beautifully arranged, Mrs. Lee?” Rosamond took the basket from her friend’s lap, where it interfered with the stocking’s progress, and set it on the grass. She sank down on the broad, rustic seat which surrounded the well’s rim.