“And that is what you want explained? You are perfectly right. A man ought not to spill his blood into a book. It looks smeared. Or else he ought to add explanatory notes. Oh, yes! the book! But the notes you ask for are extensive.” Camilla dropped her head, and they walked on silently. They were come into a section of little wooden shanties. There were a few saloons with gilded signs, some grocery stores showing sodden and specked vegetables, and empty spaces here and there, cavernous, weed-grown, and unsightly with refuse. The section was wedged in between the Lower Bank Street neighbourhood, where the well-to-do in Port Argent once builded their residences, and the upper part of the city, whither they had capriciously migrated since. The two noisy thoroughfares of Bank Street and Maple Street came together at one corner of it. A great red-brick ward schoolhouse was backed against an empty space, which was surrounded with a rickety board fence, and therein a few unhealthy trees were putting forth pale spring leaves. The still greater mass of a steepleless church thrust out its apse toward the same empty space. Aidee had spoken out of the sick bitterness which he had already noted as unreasonable. Miss Champney, he thought, was only reasonable in asking for explanatory notes. A bluebird on one of the feeble and stunted maples by the schoolhouse began to sing, “Lulu-lu,” pleading, liquid, and faint. A flabby woman at the door of one of the shanties bellowed hoarse threats at some quarrelling children. Camilla lifted her face. Her eyes were wet, and her mouth trembling at the rebuff. “I didn't think it would seem that way. I thought you might tell me--because you seemed to know, to understand about one's life--because I thought,--you seemed to know so well what I only guessed at. I didn't mean it as if it were nothing to me. I'm sorry.” Aidee stopped short, they stood in silence for some time by the old fence with its lichened boards enclosing the meagre maples and the grassless space within, where the bluebird's young spring song floated above, “Lulu-lu,” tender and unfinished, as if at that point the sweetness and pain of its thought could only be hinted at by the little wistful silence to follow. Doubtless, among the maple leaves, too, there are difficulties of expression, imprisoned meanings that peer out of dark windows, and the songsters are afraid of singing something that will not be answered in the same key. They sing a few notes wistfully and listen. They flutter about the branches, and think each other's hesitations bewildering. It happens every spring with them, when the maple buds unfold, when April breaks into smiles and tears at the discovery of her own delicate warmth, and the earth feels its myriad arteries throbbing faintly. Camilla was about to turn to go on, but he stopped her. “I won't say that I didn't mean that,” he said. “I did. I'm not sorry. Otherwise I couldn't have understood you.”