The second summer brought her back early, flying through the gate into the arms of the borrowed grandmother, hugging the aunts while they laughed and exclaimed over her growth, and dancing up and down before the young rector, who was far more glad to get her back than he himself knew. They taught each other many things that summer—to fish and to climb trees, to say rimes which some day might catch fairies, to throw stones straight, and to make dolls into Indians and early Christian martyrs. One day the rector, while writing a sermon, saw through his study window an unusual movement in the hedge just opposite. His window opened to the floor, so he went out of it, on tiptoe, to investigate. Ladybird was on the ground, trying to manage a very large saw, and scraping away with all her might at the trunk of one of the hedge plants. When the rector stood over her she looked up and laughed. “I wanted to surprise you, old parson,” she said. “I’m going to cut a hole in the hedge; it takes too long to go around by the gates!” The rector remonstrated, but she had her way, and before long there was a plainly marked path from the gap in the hedge to the study window. It was even more plainly marked during the third summer, for they began to read together, and the study held a new world for her. There were no books at the big house, and the rectory held more of books than of anything else, except peace and gentleness. The next year the borrowed grandmother was not there to welcome her, but the play and the study went on. When she was twelve she asked him the first question concerning himself. She was sitting on the sill of the long window, her thin little elbows on her knees, her chin in her little claw-like hands; she was looking at the clouds and the sunset, without seeing either. The rector could no longer see to write, and had come to the window to watch the glowing west. Whenever she scolded him, or was very serious, she would use his name. After a while she asked “Mark, why do you stay in the country?” “It’s a good place to stay in, isn’t it?” he answered. “Yes, of course. But father said that you had been asked to go to St. John’s in town. He said you were—you—Why do you stay here, Mark?” The young rector stood looking over her head at the sunset and made no reply. Ladybird looked up at him, then out toward the west again. “I know why, Mark! _They_ wouldn’t like the town.” “They’ve always had the country, you know,” he said simply. “They were so happy to come here, and they love it.” Presently he lifted her up. “Good-night, Ladybird,” he said gaily. “Fly away home!” But she walked slowly that night, and the rector went back to his sermon, which was on the simple life; his parishioners loved theories.