In some dim way the lesson of those young hemlocks went home to Una. Her lower lip sagged as she looked at them. Some part of her—some part of her—she began to feel it—was twisted by curiosity, over-wrought fancy, away from her normal self. But it was not broken off.
Suddenly—elastically—it sprang back into place: “I w-won’t go any further—after it; I won’t!” she cried aloud—and turned her head to look around.
It was then that she got the crowning shock: yet as delicate, as fairy-like—as full of glamour—as the others had been.
Something fell at her feet. A little bunch of dewy wild flowers.
Lace of the carroway, gemmed with dew, lavender wild geranium, its cheek on her shoe, a lingering woodland violet with a tear in her eye, buttercup, dandelion—ebony-stemmed maidenhair, fairy-like in its pleading.
It was beyond Una to resist flowers at her feet.
She stooped to pick them up. Was there a nettle among them? Something stung her. Stung sharply!
She was about to rub the prickling fingers across her lips, but with some thought of the poisonous weeds which, as a Camp Fire Girl she had come to know, she chafed them against her skirt—her sweater cuff—instead.
But there seemed to be no poisoner in all the innocent little bunch that rested its cheek so trustfully against her tan shoe.
Was it the tear in the violet’s eye that warned her? Was it the averted face of the drowsy dandelion, still, in the woods, half asleep? Was—oh! was there the faintest whiff about them that was not natural?