"How d' you think, Jerry?" she inquired confidentially, as if his fancies were valuable and delightful to her. That was the tone she always had for him. Jerry would have said, if he had needed to think anything about it, that Marietta was the easiest person to talk to in the whole world. But he never did think about it. She was a part of his interchange with life, as real and as inevitable as his own hungers and satisfactions. "Well," he said, while the horse slackened into a walk, with the grade of Blossom Hill, "I guess she's light-complexioned. Don't you?" "Maybe," nodded Marietta kindly. "You can't tell." "I guess she don't weigh very heavy," said Jerry, in a shamefaced bluntness, as if he wronged the absent goddess through such crudities. "You can't seem to see anybody that's had the thoughts she has and the way she's got of putting 'em--you can't see 'em very big-framed or heavy, can you? I can't, anyways." "No," said Marietta, looking down at her own plump hands folded on her knee--"no, I don't know 's you can. Only see, Jerry! I always thought this little rise was about the prettiest view there is betwixt us and the Rocky Mountains." They were on the top of Blossom Hill again, and Jerry drew the horse to a halt before winding down. All the kingdoms of the earth seemed, in Marietta's eyes, to be spread out before them. There was the rolling land of farms and villages, and beyond it the line of haze that meant, they knew, the sea. Tears filled her eyes. Then her gaze came home to an apple-tree by the side of the road. "You see that tree, Jerry?" she asked. "Well, I've always called that Mother's Tree. Once, the last o' May, we borrowed Lote's team and climbed up here, and here was that tree in full bloom. Mother had a kind of a pretty way of putting things, and she said 'twas like a bride. 'Some trees are all over pink,' she says, 'but this is white as the drifted snow.' And the winter mother died, I rode up over this hill again, to get her some things to be buried in, and I stopped and looked at that tree. It snowed the night before, and 'twas all over white, and sparkling in the sun. I spoke right out loud. 'Mother's Tree,' I says." "Sho!" said Jerry. "You never mentioned that before. Anybody could almost write something out o' that." "Could you?" asked Marietta, brightening. "I wish you would. I should admire to have you." Jerry's excitement of the night before had waned a little. Suddenly he felt tired and chill, and, although the purpose of his journey had not been accomplished, as if the zest of things had gone. "Marietta," said he, starting on the horse, "do you think much about growing old?" "I guess I don't," said Marietta brightly, and at once. "That's a terrible foolish thing to do. Least, so it seems to me." "But you don't feel as you did fifteen years ago, do you, Marietta?" He asked it wistfully. She was ready with her prompt assurance.