She does not seem large, but merely well built.  The black gowns and straight white collars that she always wore, as a sort of professional garb, have vanished before a shirtwaist with an openwork neck and half sleeves, while the flesh exposed thereby is pink and wholesome.  Hair not secured for the wear and tear of the daily rounds of school, but allowed to air itself, requires only a few hair-pins, and, if it is naturally wavy, follows its own will with good effect.  While as to her eyes, what in them seemed piercing at short range melted to an engaging frankness in the soft light under the trees.  In short, if she had been any other than Maria Maxwell, music teacher, Bart’s staid cousin and the avowed family spinster, I should have thought of her as a fine-looking woman who only needed a magic touch of some sort to become positively handsome.  Coffee and paper finished, I became aware that Bart was gazing at me.

“Well,” I said, extending my hand, “what next?” I had speedily made up my mind that Bart should take the initiative in our camping-out arrangement, and I therefore did not suggest that the first thing to be done was to set our camp itself in order.

“Come out,” he said, taking my hand in the same way that the Infant does when she wishes to lead the way to the discovery of the fairyland that lies beyond the meadows of the farm.  So we sauntered out.  Once under the sun, the same delicious thought occurred to each that, certain prudences having been seen to, we were for the time without responsibilities, and the fact made us laugh for the very freedom of it and pull one another hither and thither like a couple of children.

Meanwhile the word knoll had not been uttered, but our feet were at once drawn in its direction by an irresistible force, and presently we found ourselves standing at the lower end of the ridge and looking up the slope!

“I wish we had a picture of it as it must have been before the land was cleared,—­it would be a great help in replanting,” I said; “it needs something dense and bold for a background to the rocks.”

“The skeleton of the old barn on the other side spoils it; it ought to come down,” was Bart’s rejoinder.  “It seems as if everything we wish to do hinges on some other thing.”

This barn had been set back against the knoll so that from the house the hayloft window seemed like a part of a low shed.  Certainly our forbears knew the ways of the New England wind very thoroughly, judging by the way they huddled their houses and outbuildings in hollows or under hillsides to avoid its stress.  And when they couldn’t do that, they turned sloping, humpbacked roofs toward the northeast to shed the snow and tempt the wind in its wild moods to play leapfrog and thus pass over.

Such a roof as this has the house at the next farm, and judging by the location of the old hay barn, and the lay of the road, it must have once belonged to this adjoining property rather than to ours.