“Yes,” said Mr. Davis, “that is a very beautiful way indeed.  And I think that my little girl has all that I could wish her to have.”

“Oh, there is no need to tell me that!” laughed Helen.  “All I wish is that I might really be like David and be worth his love; I never think about anything else all day.”  The girl stood for a moment gazing at her father, and then, looking more serious, she put her arm about him and whispered softly:  “And oh, Daddy, it is too wonderful to talk about, but I ought to tell you; for some day by and by God is going to send us a new, oh, a new, new wonder!” And Helen blushed beautifully as her father gazed into her eyes.

He took her hand tenderly in his own, and the two stood for some time in silence.  When it was broken it was by the rattling of the wagon which had come to take Mr. Davis away.

David came out then to bid his guest good-by, and the three stood for a few minutes conversing.  It was not very difficult for, Helen to take leave of her father, for she would see him, so she said, in a week or two more.  She stood waving her hands to him, until the bumping wagon was lost to sight in the woods, and then she turned and took David’s hand in hers and gazed across the water at the gorgeous-colored mountains.  The lake was sparkling in the sunlight, and the sky was bright and clear, but Helen’s thoughts took a different turn from that.

All summer long she had been rejoicing in the glory of the landscape about her, in the glowing fern and the wild-flowers underfoot, and in the boundless canopy of green above, with its unresting song-birds; now there were only the shrill cries of a pair of blue-jays to be heard, and every puff of wind that came brought down a shower of rustling leaves to the already thickly-covered ground.

“Is it not sad, David,” the girl said, “to think how the beauty should all be going?”

David did not answer her for a moment.  “When I think of it,” he said at last, “it brings me not so much sadness as a strange feeling of mystery.  Only stop, and think of what that vanished springtime meant—­think that it was a presence of living, feeling, growing creatures,—­infinite, unthinkable masses of them, robing all the world; and that now the life and the glory of it all is suddenly gone back into nothingness, that it was all but a fleeting vision, a phantom presence on the earth.  I never realize that without coming to think of all the other things of life, and that they too are no more real than the springtime flowers; and so it makes me feel as if I were walking upon air, and living in a dream.”

Helen was leaning against a post of the piazza, her eyes fixed upon David intently.  “Does that not give a new meaning to the vanished spring-time?” he asked her; and she replied in a wondering whisper, “Yes,” and then gazed at him for a long time.

“David,” she said at last, “it is fearful to think of a thing like that.  What does it all mean?  What causes it?”