She looked at him with a sparkle in her eyes which made her bewitching. "I don't see that it's very different from not being engaged," she said. "It will be if you keep on looking so pretty," he declared. "I shall kiss you right here in the street, and that would make folks talk." The color came into her cheeks in a way that made her more charming still. "Now you color," Jack went on, regarding her with a teasing coolness, "you are prettier yet. Gad! I shall have to kiss you!" His horses shied at something at that instant, and he was forced to attend to them, so that May had a moment's respite in which to gather up her wits. When he looked back, she took the aggressive. "It is horrid in you to talk that way," she remarked. "Besides, you said that I needn't kiss you until I wanted to." "Well, I didn't promise not to kiss you, did I?" "How silly you are to-day!" she exclaimed. "Isn't there anything better to talk about than kissing?" Jack regarded her with a grin; a grin in which, it must be confessed, there was something of the look with which a boy watches a kitten he is teasing. "Anything better?" repeated he. "When you've had more experience, May, perhaps you won't think there is anything better." May began to look sober, and even to have the appearance of feeling that the conversation was becoming positively improper. "I think you are just horrid!" she declared. "I do wish you'd behave." He gave her a respite for some moments, and they drove along through the sunlight of the April afternoon. The trees as they came into the country were beautiful with the buds and promise of nearing summer; the air soft with that cool smoothness which is a reminder that afar the breeze has swept fragments of old snowdrifts yet unmelted; the sky moist with the mists of snow-fields that have wasted away. All the landscape was exquisite with delicate hues. The supreme color-season of New England begins about the middle of March, and lasts--at the very latest--until the middle of May. Its climax comes in late April, when pearly mists hover among the branches that are soon to be hidden by foliage. Glowing tints of amethyst, luminous gray, tender green, coral, and yellow white, make the woods a dream of poetic loveliness beside which the gorgeous and less varied hues of autumn are crude. Something dreamlike, veiled, mysterious, is felt in these tints, this iridesence of the woods in spring; as if one were looking at the luminous, rosy mists within which, as Venus amid the rainbow-dyed foam of the sea, is being shaped to immortal youth and divine comeliness the very goddess of spring. The red of the maple-buds shows from afar; the russet leaflets of the ash, the vivid green, the amber, the pearl, and the tawny of the clustering hardwood trees, set against the heavy masses of the evergreens, are far more lovely than all the broad coloring of summer or the hot tints of autumn.