"Kitty, you see I am taking it for granted that you have waited for me. What should I do if—but I know you have! that is, I know it almost always, except when I'm dog-tired or the grub has given out. Once or twice, up in the mountains, I got a bit down, but it never lasted. Because, of course, you know how every hour and every minute I am thinking of you, my darling. You must have felt it, Kitty, even when you didn't get my letters, and I'm afraid they didn't always get through, but I hope so. You must have realized that it has been you, standing right beside me, going with me through everything, that has carried me over the rough places; and there have been some pretty rough ones, darling, but all that is over now, and in about two weeks I shall be sailing for home, the happiest man in the wide world, for you are at the other end, waiting for me—aren't you, Kitty?"
Kitty got that letter. It arrived about a month after another arrival, to be chronicled in due time.
Meantime the days came and went, and it was now late April. Not yet quite spring with us, but so near that one could hear her whispering over the hill-tops. Mother Earth was making ready to receive her. There was a vast deal of house-cleaning going on. Great rains sluiced out the roads, and filled the streams to overflowing; they rushed along, brown and foaming, carrying with them the unsightly leavings of winter, who had hurried off, as usual, without "redding up" in any way. The river flowed broad and swift, dotted with floating ice-cakes; the willows along the bank showed brown smoke touched with green. Here and there were bushes with blood-red stems, vivid as coral. In the woods, snow lingered in blackish patches; almost touching these patches, ferns were unrolling, hepaticas taking off their gray furs, bloodroot opening its lovely white cups.
"And oh!" cried Kitty. "Don't speak to me, any one! I believe it's an anemone!"
Kitty was having a holiday. Madam Flynt was not going out that afternoon; John Tucker would never let her, Kitty, meet the trains; Aunt Johanna had pronounced her pale, and bidden her walk five miles and bring back a color. She had meant to be back in time for one o'clock dinner, but as she came downstairs Sarepta appeared with a neat tin box and the announcement, "Here's a snack! You can have your dinner with your supper!"
She vanished. Kitty peeped, saw chicken sandwiches and an apple turnover, and departed joyful.
"Dear Sarepta," she murmured. "If one must have a tyrant, how nice to have one who can make turnovers!"
It was a day of days. Not warm; one was not ready for warmth yet; but every breath was a delight, the air so tingled with wakening life. Kitty walked not five miles, but ten, if she had known it. She took no count of miles, swinging along over hill and dale, her quick eyes taking in every sign of promise; here a catkin waving, there a little host of green spears pushing up through the brown earth. She sat on a huge silvered root in a stump fence to eat her luncheon. A chipmunk came to make inquiries and received crumbs; a bluebird sang in a cherry tree near by. It was a delightful feast. This was on top of the Great Hill, from which one saw all the kingdoms of the earth, more or less. Kitty saw and rejoiced in all: the kingdom of pines, stretching dark and velvety along its waving miles; the kingdom of hills, bare and ruddy in the sunlight; the kingdom of streams and ponds, a great necklace of sapphires flung across the countryside. Kitty saw, and sighed with delight; then slipped her empty box in her pocket and set her face homeward. Already the sunbeams came slanting through the pines on the crest; she had a long way to go. "And I must and will go back through Lancaston Woods!" said Kitty. "Perhaps I'll make a call on Savory Bite; similarly, perhaps I won't. I wonder if his paint is blue still. Naughty Tom!"
Down the hillside went Kitty, across lots; through steep pastures of slippery russet grass, where the huddled rocks looked like flocks of gray sheep, browsing; through hanging copses, the outlying pickets of the kingdom of pines; so down at last to the kingdom itself, the long stretch of woodland, bordered on one side by the river, on the other by that shy, pleasant thoroughfare known as Lancaston Road. It was near the edge of the road that Kitty was wandering happily along, about five o'clock, when she should have been nearer home; it was here that she found the first anemone. She was bending over it in rapture, when she heard a name pronounced; not her own name, but a perversion of it to which she was now only too well accustomed.
"Katrine!" cried Wilson Wibird. "Can it be? Fate is kind for once!"