“I’ll walk home with you, Mrs. Norton,” said Lydia, suddenly.  “It seems as if one couldn’t get enough of this first spring day.”

“Do!” Ma’s voice was always extra cordial when she spoke to Lydia.

Lizzie watched the door close behind the two.  “I knew it,” she exclaimed.

“Knew what?” inquired Amos, looking up from his figures.

“That there was a new moon,” answered the old lady, shortly, trudging off to her bedroom.

“Liz is getting childish,” thought Amos, returning to his work.

“Bill’s still on the front porch,” said Ma Norton as they reached the Norton driveway.  “Do go speak to him, Lydia.  He’s amiable to-night, but he’s been like a bear for months.”

Billy’s mother went on into the kitchen entrance and Lydia went over to the dim figure on the steps.

“Your mother told me to speak to you,” she said meekly.

“I heard her.”  Billy gave a low laugh.  “Come up here in the shadow, sweetheart, and tell me if you ever saw such a moonlit and starlit night.”

But Lydia did not stir.  “Honestly, I don’t dare look at the sky any longer.  I have a quiz in rhetoric to-morrow and I’ve got to get my mind on it.”

Billy came down the steps.  “Then I’ll walk home with you.”

“No, you won’t.  I—­I just came over to see if it’s all real.  Just to touch you and then run back.  I’d rather you didn’t walk back with me.”

The night was brilliant and Billy, responding to some little petitioning note in Lydia’s voice, did not offer to touch her but stood looking down at the sweet dim face turned up to his.  She lifted her hand, that thin hand with the work calluses on it, and ran it over his cheeks, brushed her cheek against his shoulder, and then ran away.

She finished her studying and went to bed early, only to lie awake for hours.  At last, she crept out of bed and as once before, she clasped her hands and lifted her face to the heavens.  “Thank you, God!” she whispered.  Then she went to sleep.

The next night, Kent came out to the cottage.  Lydia dreaded his coming so little that she was surprised.  Yet this day had been one of continual surprise to her.  She had wakened to a dawn of robin songs, and had dressed with an answering song in her own heart.  She was as one who had never known sorrow or anxiety.  Her whole future lay before her, a clear and unobstructed pathway.

For Lydia had found herself.  She was a creature to whom a great love and devotion were essential as motive forces.  In turn she had given this, in childish form, to her mother, to little Patience and to Levine.  One by one these had been taken from her and she had struggled to give this devotion to Kent, but she could not give where there was no understanding.

And now she saw that for years it had been Billy.  Billy who combined all the best of what her mother, her baby sister, and Levine had meant to her, with something greatly more—­the divinity of passion—­a thing she could not understand, yet that had created a new world for her.