Mercy was sitting on a mound which was thick-grown with the shining wintergreen.  She picked a stem which had a cluster of red berries on it, and below the berries one tiny pink blossom.  As she held it up, the blossom fell, leaving a tiny satin disk behind it on its stem.  She took the bell and tried to fit it again on its place; then she turned it over and over, held it up to the light and looked through it.  “It makes me sad,” she said:  “I wish I knew if the flower knows any thing about the fruit.  If it were working to that end all the while, and so were content to pass on and make room, it would seem all right.  But I don’t want to pass on and make room!  I do so like to be here!”

Parson Dorrance looked from one woman’s face to the other, both young, both lovely:  Lizzy’s so full of placid content, unquestioning affection, and acceptance; Mercy’s so full of mysterious earnestness, far-seeing vision, and interpretation.

“What a lot lies before that gifted creature,” he said to himself, “if life should go wrong with her!  If only I might dare to take her fate into my hands!  I do not believe any one else can do for her what I could, if I were only younger.”  And the Parson sighed.

That night he stayed in Penfield at Lizzy’s house.  The next morning, on his way to Danby, he stopped to see Mercy for a moment.  When he entered her door, he had no knowledge of what lay before him; he had not yet said to himself, had not yet dared to say to himself, that he would ask Mercy to be his wife.  He knew that the thought of it was more and more present with him, grew sweeter and sweeter; yet he had never ceased resisting it, saying that it was impossible.  That is, he had never ceased saying so in words; but his heart had ceased resisting long ago.  Only that traitor which we call judgment had been keeping up a false show of resolute opinion, just to lure the beguiled heart farther and farther on in a mistaken security.

But love is like the plants.  It has its appointed days for flowers and for the falling of the flowers.  The vague, sweetness of the early hours and days together, the bright happiness of the first close intimacy and interchange,—­these reach their destined moment, to pass on and make room for the harvest.  Blessed are the lives in which all these sweet early petals float off gently and in season for the perfect setting of the holy fruit!

On this morning, when Parson Dorrance entered Mercy’s room, it was already decorated as if for a festival.  Every blooming thing she had brought from “The Cedars” the day before had taken its own place in the room, and looked as at home as it had looked in the fields.  One of Mercy’s great gifts was the gift of creating in rooms a certain look which it is hard to define.  The phrase “vitalized individuality,” perhaps, would come as near describing it as is possible; for it was not merely that the rooms looked unlike other rooms.  Every article in them seemed to stand in the place where