"Lucky I told you!" This with pearly sarcasm.
"Now that I know—I'm afraid—I'm afraid.... But I've always loved her. It began in Arcadia, that is, Central Park. You roller-skate there when you are little. She was knee-high to a grasshopper, and I was shoulder-high. She wore a coat of gosling-green with facings of primrose-yellow, and when she fell and barked the knee of one stocking I took her to old Martha, and old Martha mended her. Her knee itself wasn't really hurt, but it was all rough and gritty from the asphalt. She didn't cry. And so I loved her. Why is she so long changing into outdoor things?"
"Hush!" pearled Lord Harrow's daughter. "She's coming."
And the Poor Boy's heart echoed: "She's coming—she's coming."
At the last moment reason and experience whispered in his ear: "Don't be a fool—don't spoil everything. If you tell her you love her and she says she loves you, why the least you can do is to kiss her, and you know as well as I do that if you touch them they vanish."
So the Poor Boy walked with Joy that day and the next and the next, and they were never very far apart, and he got to love her more and more. And the more he loved her the more dangerous was it to tell her so, for things got to such a point that if she had suddenly vanished, the blow would almost have broken his heart.
X
But it was the heart of winter, not the Poor Boy's that was to be broken. March came, and a wind from the south. Snow melted in sunny corners, to freeze again at night, and melted and froze; and April came, and wherever the Poor Boy went with his love there was a sound of water falling, running, and roaring. The ice in lakes and streams wore thin along the shores, broke, lost its grip, tinkled in the brooks, clashed and cracked in the river. In the lakes the margin of water between the ice islands and the shore grew wider and wider. In open spaces, faced south, the snow melted and thinned until black soil showed in patches. Rain came, more and more frequently, until no day passed without rain, and the land was washed clean of winter, and rinsed, and became deep mud, that oozed and gasped under foot.