There are days in spring wherein advance seems as passive as is the progress of a log down the race of a spring freshet.  Then there are other days wherein it seems that every mote must feel to the full its sentient life, and its swelling towards development or fulfilment.  On a day like the latter, everything and everybody bestirs.  The dust motes spin in whirling columns, the gnats dance for their lives their dance of death before the wayfarer.  The gardeners and the grave-diggers turn up the earth with energy, making the clods fly like water.  The rich play, or work that they may play, as do the poor.  Everybody is up and wide awake and doing.  The earth and the habitations thereof are rubbed, cleaned, and swept, or skylarked over; the boy plays with his marbles on the sidewalk or whoops over the fields; the housewives fling wide open their house windows, and the dust of the winter flies out like smoke; the tradesmen set out their new wares to public view, the bees make honey, the birds repeat their world-old nesting songs, the cocks crow straight through the day; nothing stops till the sun sets, and even then it is hard for such an ardent clock of life to quite run down.

It was that spirit of unrest which had sent the two ladies out making calls.  There was not one where, if the womenkind were at home at all and not afield, but they had been possessed of the spring activity, until they reached the Ranger place, where the new-comers to Banbridge lived.  The Ranger place was, in some respects the most imposing house in Banbridge.  It stood well back from the road, in grounds which deserved the name.  They were extensive, dotted with stately groups of spruces and pines, and there was in the rear of the house a pond with a rustic bridge, fringed with willows, which gave the place its name, “Willow Lake.”  The house had formerly been owned by two maiden women with much sentiment, the sisters of the present owner.  The place was “Willow Lake.”  The pond was the “Willow Mere,” in defiance of the name of the place.  The little rustic bridge was the “Bridge of Sighs,” for some obscure reason, perhaps buried in the sentimental past of the sisters.  And the little hollow which was profusely sprinkled with violets in the spring was “Idlewild.”  It was in “Idlewild” that the new family, perverse to the spirit of the day, idled when the callers drove up the road in the best coach.

There was in the little violet-sprinkled hollow a small building with many peaks as to its roof, and diamond-paned windows which had been fitted out with colored glass in a hideous checker-work of orange and crimson and blue, which the departed sisters had called, none but themselves knew why, “The Temple.”  On the south side grew a rose-bush of the kind which flourished most easily in the village, taking most kindly to the soil.  It was an ordinary kind of rose.  The sisters had called it an eglantine, but it was not an eglantine.  They had been very fond, when the weather permitted, of sitting in this edifice with their work.  The place was fitted up with a rustic table and two quite uncomfortable rustic chairs, particularly uncomfortable for the sisters, who were of a thin habit of body.