She kept on, straight up the winding lane, to the border of the woods.  When she had reached the first trees, a fine group of oak and chestnut, lifting stately limbs, long uncut, far into the summer air, she turned and paused to look back.  From this point she could see far, and the whole of her family’s possessions lay before her, outspread in all the beauty of June at its bonniest.  Impulsively she stretched out her arms.

“Sally Lane,” she said softly to herself, with her eyes scanning it all, “if there’s a happier girl than you in the world to-day, she must be entirely out of her senses with joy.”

After a little she sat down, her back against a tree-trunk, her face toward the distant view....  Presently a big green oak leaf fluttered down past her eyes, and fell into her lap.  “That’s odd,” she thought, and looked up.  Nothing could be seen but the great limbs, rugged with years, of the oak beneath which she sat.  She looked off again at the view.  Another leaf came swirling down past her, lighting on the ground.  “It’s probably a squirrel,” she explained to herself, concerning this phenomenon of falling leaves in June, and tried again to descry its source, without success.  When, however, a shower of the green missiles came down together, she got to her feet, and walked around the tree.

“They had to come, thick as leaves in Vallombrosa,” remarked a familiar voice from far above her, “before you would pay attention.  I fired for at least ten minutes before you would so much as look up.  Will you come up, or shall I come down?”

“I’d like to come up,” Sally replied, smiling up into Jarvis’s brown face, as she espied him, sitting astride a limb well up in the branching foliage.  “But I don’t think it’s practical.”

“Why be practical?  Nobody is practical on Strawberry Acres, according to a certain brilliant but skeptical attorney from town.  Your greatest aim has been to remain a girl as long as possible.  Girls climb trees. Ergo—­”

He began to descend.  “Wait!” cried Sally, as he set foot on the lowest limb, a matter of ten feet above her head, and paused to look down at her.  “Stay there, please—­Do you really want me to come up?”

“Very much.  It’s entirely possible.  Set your foot on that knob, reach up your arm, I’ll let myself down far enough to get hold of your hand, and the next thing you know you’ll be sitting beside me here.”

“Then what will happen?”

“Then—­we’ll have a little talk I’ve been waiting for all day.  I began to think I couldn’t get it till evening fell, when the garden might help me out.”

“I think the garden is a very nice place for conversation.”  Sally put both hands behind her back, looking up at him.

“Better than the limb of an oak tree?  I admit it—­for some sorts of conversation.  Up here I should be forced to hold on with one arm.  But there would be compensation in that, for with the other arm I should be forced to hold you on!”