"I don't know 's I do. Don't seem as if 'twould be natural if I did. Take a tree, take that apple-tree back there--I don't know 's you could say it had the same feelings it did when it sprouted up out o' the seeds. We're in a kind of a procession, seems if, marching along towards--well, I don't know what all. But wherever we're going, it's all right, I say. It's all right." They were silent then for a time, each scanning the roadsides and the vista before them framed in drooping branches and enriched by springing sward. "You seem to have a good deal of faith, Marietta," said he suddenly. "But you ain't much of a hand to talk about it." "Course I got faith," she answered. "It ain't any use for anybody to tell me there ain't a good time coming. I don't have to conjure up some kind of a hope. I know." "How do you know?" asked Jerry. She gave a sudden irrepressible laugh. "I guess it's because the sky is so pretty," she said. "Maybe the robins have got something to do with it. Days like this I feel as if I was right inside the pearly gates. I truly do." They were entering the shade of evergreens that bordered the ravine road, where there were striated cliffs, and little runnels came trickling down to join the stream below. "I guess there ain't a spot round here that means more to folks in our neighborhood than this," said Marietta. "Remember the time somebody wanted to name it 'Picnic Road'? There were seventeen picnics that summer, if I recollect, all in our set." "Yes," said Jerry. He remembered his poem about the "awesome amphitheatre nature wrought," and wondered if Marietta also recalled it and would quote some of it. But she only said:-- "That kind of a round where we used to eat our suppers is about the prettiest spot I ever see. That's where I'm going to set up my tent whilst you're making your call. When you come back you can poke right on in there and 'coot,' and I'll answer." Jerry's mercurial spirits were mounting now. The past few minutes had given him two beautiful subjects for poetry. He could make some four-lined verses, he thought, about the tree that was a bride in spring and the next winter robed for burial. He could hear the cadence of them now, beating through his head in premonitory measures. Then there was the other fancy that life was a procession to an unknown goal. Jerry had read very little, except in the works of Ruth Bellair and her compeers, and the imaginings he wrought in had a way of seeming new and strange. The talk went on, drifting back irresistibly by the familiar way they were taking to the spring of their own lives, not, it seemed, in search of a lost youth, but as if they had it with them, an invisible third, in all their memories.