A smile soft and sweet crossed her lips and gradually expanded into a laugh that vied with the song of the bird in the tree.
Clarinda was thrilled, and her heart went out to meet the lover who would come.
When she turned from the sun and the day without and the perfume of the flowers, a tear fell down her cheeks cutting its way through the pink and white to the floor.
A fear gripped her. She felt she might be giving up more than she was gaining. It came to her that she was leaving all that had made her. In these surroundings she had grown, and now she was arriving at one end of her life. Further, she knew she was about to take a step into new fields; she would be thrown into a new perspective; a new condition of which she knew nothing and all these things she loved would fade from her and be lost.
It convulsed her as she felt her youth was dead.
She turned from the things about her and looked again across the fields, and thought she could see her youth being carried to its last resting place upon this beautiful day. To her the grave seemed dug, the mourners assembled. She could even hear the toll of the bells for its interment. Terribly oppressed by the idea she withdrew her hand from the curtain and fell upon her knees by the side of her bed and prayed.
Clarinda prayed for a long time, then she arose from her knees, shook the tears from her eyes and throwing a raiment of filmy stuff about her made her toilet.
Her golden hair she piled in many waves about her head. A smile broke across her lips as she looked at herself in a glass. The fear had passed from her heart and left it in a tumult of joy.
Clarinda fitted one pink foot after another pink foot into two pink slippers, then she went from the room out upon the landing to the head of the stairs.
Below her were banked flowers. Men, bearing other masses ran hither and thither, placing them as they were brought in by other men.