I caught her by the arm. “Easy, easy,” I cautioned. “You’re a broken-down, nervous wreck, remember. You mustn’t overdo things.”
Her moods were many that afternoon. Again she looked at me, but didn’t laugh. Her eyes, instead, held a sort of startled gratitude, like those of a person, unused to kindness, suddenly befriended. She was no longer the child let loose in the woods. She walked slowly at my side, and so we came down to the high-road again. At the road we looked back to the hilltop where we had been.
“How much easier the climb looks than it is,” said she.
“That’s the way of hills–and other things,” said I sententiously.
“I knew about the other things,” she answered. “Now I’ve learned it about the hills. It seems as if I were learning all the old similes wrong end foremost, doesn’t it?–springs and–and all?”
Her tone was wistful, and it was with difficulty that I refrained from touching her hand. “Oh, there’s something to be said for that method,” I answered cheerfully. “Think of all the pleasant things you have to learn. The other way around you get the grim realism last.”
But a thought plagued her as we turned down the side road to my house. However, her face cleared as we drew near, and as the house itself appeared she clapped her hands, crying, “Now, where are we going to put the trilliums?”
“At the edge of the pines,” I suggested, “where they can talk with the brook?”
“Yes, that’s the place.” Suddenly she paused, looked back up the slope, and cried, “Do you suppose this brook is that spring?”
I hastily ran over the contour of the country we had passed through, and saw that indeed the spring must be its headwaters.