"I beg pardon?" inquired Miss Baggs.
"The color of leaves," explained Letitia.
"Well," Miss Baggs retorted, smartly, "some leaves are light, and some are dark, and some leaves are in-between."
There was a dangerous gleam in Letitia's eyes. "Show me all your green cloths," she requested, curtly—"all of them." Miss Baggs obeyed.
"I suppose it really isn't Lincoln green, you know," Letitia said, when she had brought the parcel home with her and had spread its contents upon the sofa, "but I hope you'll like it, Dove. It is the nearest to tree-green I could find."
It was, indeed.
Now, Dove had never heard of a boy in green, and had grave doubts, which it would not do, however, to even hint to dear Letitia; so made it was, that archer-suit, though by some strange freak of fancy that caused Letitia keen regret, Robin, dressed in it, could seldom be induced to play at archery, always insisting, to her discomfiture, that he was Grass!
"When you grow up, my bowman," she once told him, "I'll buy you a white suit, all of flannel, and father shall teach you to play at cricket in the orchard."
"But crickets are black," cried Robin, whose eye for color, or the absence of it, I told Letitia, was bound to ruin her best-laid English plans.
It was good to see them, the Archer Bold and the Gray Lady walking together, hand-in-hand—the one beaming up, the other down; the one so subject to sudden leaps and bounds and one-legged hoppings to avoid the cracks, the other flurried lest those wild friskings should disturb the balance she had kept so perfectly all those years till then.