“Bill Blake?” he questioned. “Do you mean Billy Blake who was half-back on the Harvard eleven last year?”
She tossed her head and laughed merrily.
“I love that!” she replied lingeringly, as though to prolong her joy in his ignorance. “I was thinking of a poet of that name who wrote a nice verse something like this:
| ‘I give you the end of a golden string; Only wind it into a ball, It will lead you in at Heaven’s gate, Built in Jerusalem’s wall.’” |
No girl had ever quoted poetry to him before, and he was thinking more of her pretty way of repeating the stanza—keeping time with her hands—than of the verse itself.
“Well,” he said, “what’s the rest of it?”
“Oh, there isn’t any rest of it! Don’t you see that there couldn’t be anything more—that it’s finished—a perfect little poem all by itself!”
He played with a loosened bit of stone, meekly conscious of his stupidity. And he did not like to appear stupid before a girl who danced alone in the starlight and hung moons in trees.
“I’m afraid I don’t get it. I’d a lot rather stay by this wall talking to you than go to Jerusalem.”
“You’d be foolish to do that if you really had the end of the golden string, and could follow it to Paradise. I think it means any nice place—just any place where happiness is.”