"He treats me like a child, too," Isabelle complained to Margaret; "gives me a little lesson now and then, and then says 'Run along now and be a good girl.'"
"It is a long lesson," Margaret admitted, "learning how to live, especially when you begin when we did. But after you have turned the pages for a while, somehow it counts."
CHAPTER LXI
The first of March was still deep winter in Grosvenor, but during the night the southwest wind had begun to blow, coming in at Isabelle's window with the cool freshness of anticipated spring. The day was calm and soft, with films of cloud floating over the hills, and the indefinable suggestion of change in the air, of the breaking of the frost. The southwest wind had brought with it from the low land the haze, as if it had come from far warm countries about the Gulf, where the flowers were already blooming and the birds preparing for the northward flight. It touched the earth through the thick mantle of ice and snow, and underneath in the rocky crust of frozen ground there was the movement of water. The brooks on the hills began to gurgle below the ice.
Up there in the north the snow had come early in the autumn, covering as with a warm blanket this rocky crust before the frost could strike deep. "An early spring," Sol Short announced at dinner, a dreamy look in his eyes, like the soft sky outside, the look of unconscious gladness that rises in man at the thought of the coming year, the great revival of life…. That afternoon Margaret and Isabelle drove over the snowy upland, where the deep drifts in the fields had shrivelled perceptibly, sucked by the warm sun above and the opening earth beneath. The runners of the sleigh cut into the trodden snow, and in the sheltered levels of the road the horse's feet plashed in slush. The birches and alders lifted their bare stems hardily from the retreating drifts. Soft violet lights hovered in the valleys.
"It is coming, Spring!" Margaret cried.
"Remember, Mr. Short said there would be many a freeze before it really came to stay!"
"Yes, but it is the first call; I feel it all through me."
The week before Ned had left the hospital, and for the first time in three years had sat at the table with his brother and sister. His face had lost wholly the gray look of disappointed childhood. Spring, arrested, was coming to him at last….
As they climbed upward into the hills the stern aspect of winter returned, with the deep drifts of snow, the untracked road. When they topped the Pass and looked down over the village and beyond to the northern mountains, the wind caught the sharp edges of the drifts and swept a snowy foam in their faces. But the sun was sinking into a gulf of misty azure and gold, and the breath of awakening earth was rising to meet the sun.