"Let's let down the bars," said the New Lady, "and drive into that next meadow. If it is a sea, as it looks, it will be glad of your company."
It was not a sea, for as we drove through the lush grass the yellow and purple people of the meadow came marching to meet us, as dignified as garden flowers, save that you knew, all the time, that wild hearts were beating beneath the rainbow tassels. It was a meadow with things to say, but with finger on lip—as a meadow should be and as a spirit must be. The meadow seemed to wish to say: "It is all very pleasant for you there in the village to admire one another's wings, but the real romance is in the flight." I wondered if it were not so that it had happened—that one day a part of the village had got tired waiting, and had broken off and become something free, of which the meadow was the body and its secret was the spirit. But then the presence of the New Lady always sets me wondering things like this.
"Why," I said to her suddenly, "spring has gone! I wonder how that happened. I have been waiting really to get hold of spring, and here it is June."
"June-and-a-half," assented the New Lady, and touched the lines so that we came to a standstill in the shade of a cottonwood.
"This way," she said—and added softly, as one who would not revive a sadness, her own idea of the matter.
"Where did Spring die? I did not hear her go
Down the soft lane she painted. All flower still
She moved among her emblems on the hill
Touching away their burden of old snow.
Was it on some great down where long winds flow