Now was he no longer made lonesome by every coquettish touch the more that the year put to her toilet. For the girl of the regal hair smiled to him, surreptitiously with her lips, but unguardedly with her eyes, when he came by her glass-case; while he dawdled in the window opposite, she communicated with him by signs no other eye could have perceived. Even before their acquaintance had become very old, she slipped out to walk in the garden, and they sat on the green seats and had long, foolish, youthful talks--delightful, foolish, youthful times. Her conversation took an amusing interest from the peculiarities of her education. She had seen and heard much in her short life in a hard world, where it was no one's affair to keep anything from her young ken--much of dark, and petty, and unpicturesque--preserving through all a sort of hardy innocence; and she had borrowed from a cheap circulating library a vast lot of fiction dealing with the supremely grand. Her preference in literature, however, had remained for fairy tales, a taste formed when it had been one of her duties to read aloud to certain little children of the rich. She knew them by the score. It was to this, perhaps, some of her remarks owed the fanciful touch that redeemed them from the commonness of her general conversation--a genial commonness, condoned to such young lips. She had a childish way of lending a personality to everything, that amused him more than epigram would have done. She ascribed intention to the wind that blew off her hat, and stopped to express her mind to it. She assumed consciousness in the bench they sat on; she wanted to take the same one, lest it should think they slighted it because it was rickety, for which it was not to blame. Every flower was to her a person. "Hush! They are listening!" she said, looking from the corner of her eye at a bank of knowing pansies. She scolded a button for coming off, as if the want of principle shown by it had been a thing to revolt her. She stood in a one-sided relation of good-fellowship with the brown birds hopping among the gravel, and the fishes in the pond; she spared them many crumbs. With homely good-heartedness she took into an amused regard all the family of spring--buds, blades, insects--addressing speech to them as if she had been a giant and they a very little people. Never can spring return without Fraisier's remembering that spring. It was bright; by it all the springs following have been cast in the shadow.