“It always seems to me,” said Cousin Roxy, the first time she drove down with Billie to spend the day, “as if Maytime is a sort of fulfilled promise to us, after the winter and spring. When I was a girl, spring up here behaved itself. It was sweet and balmy and gentle, and now it’s turned into an uncertain young tomboy. The weather doesn’t really begin to settle until the middle of May, but when it does—” She drew in a deep breath, and smiled. “Just look around you at the beauty it gives us.” She sat out on the tree seat in the big old-fashioned garden that sloped from the south side of the house to what Jean called “the close.” The terraces were a riot of spring bloom; tall gold and purple flag lilies grew side by side with dainty columbine and poet’s narcissus. Along the stone walls white and purple lilacs flung their delicious perfume to every passing breeze. The old apple trees that straggled in uneven rows up through the hill pasture behind the barn, had been transformed into gorgeous splashy masses of pink bloom against the tender green of young foliage. “What’s Jean doing over there in the orchard?” Kit rose from her knees, her fingers grimy with the soil, her face flushed and warm from her labors, and answered her own query. “She’s wooing the muse of Art. What was her name? Euterpe or Merope? Well, anyway that’s who she’s wooing, while we, her humble sisters, who toil and delve after cut worms—Cousin Roxy, why are there any cut worms? Why are there fretful midges? Or any of those things?” “Land, child, just as home exercises for our patience,” laughed Mrs. Ellis, happily. Jean was out of their hearing. Frowning slightly, with compressed lips, she bent over her work. With Shad’s help she had rigged up a home-made easel of birchwood, and a little three legged camp stool. As Shad himself would have said, she was going to it with a will. The week before she had sent off five studies to Cousin Beth, and two of her very best ones, down to Mr. Higginson. Answers had come back from both, full of criticism, but with plenty of encouragement, too. Mrs. Robbins had read the two letters and given her eldest the quick impulsive embrace which ever since her babyhood had been to Jean her highest reward of merit. But it was from her father, perhaps, that she derived the greatest happiness. He laid one arm around her shoulders, smiling at her with a certain whimsical speculation, in his keen, hazel eyes. “Well, girlie, if you will persist in developing such talent, we can’t afford to hide this candle light under a bushel. Bethiah has written also, insisting that you are given your chance to go abroad with her later on.” “What does Mother say?” asked Jean, quickly. She knew that the only thing that might possibly hold her back from the trip abroad would be her mother’s solicitude and loving fears for her welfare. “She’s perfectly willing to let you go as long as Cousin Beth goes with you. It would only be for three months.”