"Because I thought more of making a good ten - cent piece than I did of your foolishness."

The clamor all around built a wall between them and the crowd. Behind it they were as alone as in their own garden spaces at home. Yet they spoke with hushed voices.

Mrs. Stone's small figure was one flame of wrath from head to foot.

"But I wanted them to take to Cornelia, and you knew it!" she gasped.

"You ain't no right to be different from other folks. Robert Stone went the same way David did, and just a week later. And Robert Stone's mother don't carry on the way you do. And, anyhow, Cornelia cared more for Robert than she did for David."

She started as though he had struck her with a stone. "Taking them white flowers away won't make me any different," she said, breathlessly. "I've been doing it eighteen year, and I ain't going to change, and you know it."

"There's a boy wanting something." In an instant he was keen for his wares. 66 Radishes, son? Good and fresh. Six cents a bunch."

Overhead the sky was a clear, solitary blue; the sun shone with a warmth like that of wine. The wind was blowing a little. The noise, the motion, the swarm of faces, dark, fair, or alien; the white or purple lilacs which many of the women carried; the alert native tongue here, the guttural foreign one there; the changing moment; the spirit, the poetry of it all-made a picture new and yet ancient, strangely American, and yet Homeric enough to be lasting and universal. Another hour sped; the crowd began to thin out into occasional groups of belated and thrifty housewives, ready to drive sharp bargains with the tired country folk. Presently the market-bell clanged stridently the stroke of noon.

"Market's over," said old Mr. Stone; "pretty fair market, too. Sold out all to that mess of onions." He tossed a heap into the basket of a sad-eyed Italian beggar-woman waiting near by. "Liza!" Mrs. Stone approached from the rear of the wagon, the fire still smouldering in her eyes. In her hand she carried a few half-opened daffodils.

"This is all I've got left out of what

I pulled last night," she said. "It's a wonder you didn't sell them along with them lilacs."

"I ain't any time to talk about that," said her husband, brusquely. "Did you take that order for five pound of butter next week?" "Yes."

"Well, let's hurry and fasten up, then." A half-hour later, the Stone wagon, packed high with empty cans, boxes, and crocks, and drawn by an old and stout white horse, pulled leisurely out of the deserted market-place and into the shoplined streets of the city. Mrs. Stone, still holding the few withering daffodils, sat on the front seat, beside her husband. On her lap lay a square package, wrapped in stiff brown paper and tied with lavender ribbons.

They were clear of the town, and its spires were slipping palely behind them into a sea of April haze, violet and shifting, before either found tongue for speech. It was the old man who began. "What you got in that package, 'Liza?" She turned on him with a sort of gasp. "What did you mean by saying Cornelia cared more for Robert Stone than for our David?"

"I asked first," said the stubborn man. "You answer me, and I'll answer you."

The woman yielded to her steadier mate. "It's some gingerbread I baked yesterday for Cornelia Hart's birthday. I'm going to get down when we reach the lane, and go and give it to her."

"Well, then," said Mr. Stone, “I guess it was something Robert's mother told me that made me think that about Cornelia and Robert. She told me this time last year, when you were going on as usual. She said that one man cared for Cornelia - meaning David - and Cornelia cared for another man, and then I knew she meant her Robert. And she said Cornelia come up there once and asked her for Robert's picture."

"That didn't mean anything," proclaimed Mrs. Stone, confidently, "being as they were cousins, and both died sudden, and about the same time. She took an interest in Robert because he was in the family; that's all." Then she flashed again. "I don't believe Cornelia Hart ever looked at Robert Stone when our David was around!"

Her husband went on with a sort of obstinate deliberation: "You can believe or don't believe all you want. I wouldn't mind if her birthday come on Sunday or any day we ain't in market, for then only me and you would know about it. And I wouldn't mind when it come if you kept it like other folks. But you don't, and it's what you say more'n what you do, for you won't keep quiet, and people kind of smile, and I get mad." He pondered a little. "I wouldn't be surprised

VOL CVII.-No. 637-4

"It's good to remember," she began, wistfully. "Cornelia thinks about it the same as I do. She's always thought so. She knew David had as good as asked her, and she acted according." The undercurrent of her passion swept her along again, and she ended with her old vehemence: "And she wouldn't have looked at his cousin Robert."

They rumbled on and on. It was like riding into the heart of a pale and heavenly country, a land unspoiled of time and untouched of sorrow; for, on either side, in twos or threes about the straggling houses, or in bending orchard rows beyond them, the fruit boughs were in the thick of blossoming. Here and there, in some quiet front yard, to be singled out by the wind and blown back and forth like a flame of spectral fire, a peachtree burned delicately red. Little stretches of water, left by an early rain, lay like polished copper in the hollows of the pike.

"I'm going to get out now, Nathan." The country road was beginning to change into a village street. Already the roofs clustered closer together and an occasional wooden pavement began to appear. The wagon stopped, and Mrs. Stone let herself carefully down into the middle of the highway.

"You going to send Cornelia any word, Nathan?" She looked up at him with eyes that were both solemn and defiant. "No, I ain't."

She stood a moment and watched the retreating vehicle; then, crossing the road, turned down a little lane that opened into it from one side. It was a sheltered place, full of the early spring and a hundred searching odors of herb and bush and furrow. The first bees of the year went drunkenly down the warm air. She stepped slowly along. One hand, spread palm upward, held the precious package, the other the few daffodils. The militant expression died out of her old face. The doubts stirred by her husband's conversation floated lightly away from her soul, and certainty, born of the habit of years, once more possessed her. Unseeing, she kept on down the road, and as she went a ghostly foot seemed to keep step with hers.

of a life to her faithless and denser neighbors, but to her it had gone like a wind in the night, and her son was as quick to her now as in that time before the doom of the family had overtaken him. Presently there came in sight a narrow, high, unpainted house set back in a wide green space, half yard, half orchard. A good many cherry trees, some young, some gnarled with service, rose irregularly about. Almond-bushes, pinky white and windy, grew close to the rude door - sill. The house behind looked as if wrapped around in a fair white cloud.

Mrs. Stone halted a moment on the wooden pavement, and looked admiringly over the palings. "What a lot of bloom Cornelia's got this season!" she said. "I never saw so much white on them trees before."

She opened the gate. A shower of loosened petals fell over her as she passed up the winding walk. "Good - evening, Cornelia," she called out.

A woman, much younger than Mrs. Stone, waited at the door of the little house. She was middle-aged, but a certain girlishness of color and figure took away the look of her years. A sort of oldfashioned prettiness was in the cut of the gown she wore and the wavy fashion in which she coiled her hair. She had a meditative look in her soft eyes.

"I come as soon as I could, Cornelia," cried the old woman.

"I've been expecting you," said Cornelia. She came forward and took the beribboned package out of Mrs. Stone's hands.

"Open it, Cornelia."

The middle-aged woman undid the brown paper, and put her nose down to the sweet scented squares it contained. "How good it smells!" she said. "I always did like gingerbread better'n anything else."

"I know you do, and that's the reason I bake that kind." "Thank you," said Cornelia, and kissed her.

"Let's stay out here a while," said Mrs. Stone.

There was a twisted bench beneath one of the cherry-trees. The two sat down on it side by side.

"You're forty year old to-day, Cornelia."

"Yes, I know I am," said Cornelia. "He's been gone eighteen year," said the old woman. "Yes."

"Don't you think he'd be glad I keep your birthday like this, Cornelia, and never miss baking the cake or anything?" "I expect he would."

"I don't understand some folks' way of thinking of their dead," said Mrs. Stone, in a singsong voice, and with uplifted, head, as though speaking to an unseen listener behind the cherry-trees. "They think of them as being dead. Now, to me, David's living, and if he knows and maybe he does, he's enjoying this spring weather; and he's pleased there's so many blossoms; and he likes it that I don't forget your gingerbread or anything."

Cornelia Hart sat on in the thick of the April blossoming, the package of cake still open upon her knee. Long since her weaker will had gone down before the old woman's dominant one; but there were yet times when she swayed like a reed in a very whirlwind of doubts. "People are different," she said.

Mrs. Stone shook the cherry flakes out of her woollen lap and rose to her feet. "Come on in; it's getting late.”

On the floor of the little front room lay a rag carpet of vivid blues and scarlets, hidden here and there at regular intervals by braided rag mats containing the same hues. A clock stood on the wooden mantel, and over it hung the family photographs, a progressive succession of young, elderly, and ancient faces, framed in cheap gilt, and all fronting the spectator with a certain vague pathos due to fading of tint and expression. Against the whitewashed walls lifted a row of cane-bottomed chairs, and between two of them, fronting the door, a small table, upon whose fair linen cover were arranged a couple of gilt-edged china plates. Flanking each was a wineglass full of some rosy-colored wine.

Cornelia set down the cake in the middle of the table, and then the two took their places, one on each side of it.

"I wish you many happy returns," said Mrs. Stone, touching her glass to her lips and bowing stiffly to Cornelia.

Cornelia made a bow as stiff as her guest's, and they both began sipping the wine out of the long-stemmed glasses.

"Take a piece of gingerbread, Mis' Stone."

It was very quiet in this house. The clock, an antique one, with a wreath of gilt roses painted around its face, ticked on the mantel, and yet its sound was remote, as though time itself had swung back to an earlier day, when the ghosts of Love and Youth now haunting the place had been living, breathing presences. An upstairs shutter flapped. Outside, the breeze blew here and there, and the noise it made was sweet as well as sober. "Nobody in the house except you and me, Cornelia?”

They're all gone out."

They always run away from us this time every year, and I don't think it's becoming. If they have no respect for the dead, they ought to for the living. I guess they think I'm sort of queer in my mind."

"They don't understand," said Cornelia.

The old woman took up the handful of daffodils she had a moment before laid down beside her plate. "They're all I could get," she said, querulously. “I had some white lilacs, but Nathan took and sold them. He did it because he was mad at me saving them for you."

"There's a lot of bloom outside, Mis' Stone."

"Yes, I never remember seeing so much before. Last year it was only a sprinkling here and there, and the year before that, too. I'll take all you can pull me, Cornelia."

She went and sat on the little stone slab that served for a step. "Leave them dishes alone till I'm gone," she called back into the room. "There, now, you've spilled some of that wine you left in your cup. You'll have to wash that table-cloth first thing, Cornelia. It ain't fit to be used any more."

Presently the other woman came out, and began to break off branch after branch of the delicate almond blossoms. Mrs. Stone watched her from the step.

"Many's the time I've trotted up to the churchyard with my arms full of that stuff, and I guess it's many another time I'll do the same. You pull and you

The other stopped under the trees, and looked across at Mrs. Stone with meditative eyes. She too saw a familiar face in the soft spaces of the spring air, but it was not that of the old woman's

Robert.

"I don't begrudge other people their sons," shrilled the emotional old voice, "though I've done without mine for eighteen year, and when they lose them I'm sorry for them. But I do say none