As Molly passed down the Haunt's Walk, it seemed to her, also, that the spring had suddenly blossomed. A moment before she had not known that the path she trod was changing to emerald, that the meadows were spangled with wild-flowers, that the old oaks on the lawn were blushing in rose and silver. For weeks these miracles had happened around her, and she had not noticed. As oblivious to them as old Adam Doolittle was, she had remembered only that her birthday came on the seventeenth of April, when, except for some luckless mishap, the promise of the spring was assured. A red-winged blackbird darted like a flame across the path in front of her, and following it into the open, she found Kesiah gathering wild azalea on the edge of the thicket. At the girl's approach, the elder woman rose from her stooping posture, and came forward, wearing a frown, which, after the first minute, Molly saw was directed at the sunlight, not at herself. Kesiah's long, sallow face under the hard little curls of her false front, had never appeared more grotesque than it did in the midst of the delicate spring landscape. Every fragile blossom, every young leaf, every blade of grass, flung an insult at her as she stood there frowning fiercely at the sunbeams. Yet only five minutes before she had suffered a sharp recrudescence of soul--of that longing for happiness which is a part of the resurrection of the spring, and which may survive not only the knowledge of its own fruitlessness, but a belief in the existence of the very happiness for which it longs. All the unlived romance in her heart had come to life with the young green around her. Middle-age had not deadened, it had merely dulled her. For the pang of desire is not, after all, the divine prerogative of youth, nor has it even a conscious relation to the possibility of fulfilment. Her soul looked out of her eyes while she gazed over the azalea in her hand--yet, in spite of the songs of the poets, the soul in her eyes did not make them beautiful. "I came down with Jonathan, Molly," she said. "You will doubtless find him at the brook." For an instant she hesitated in confusion and then added hurriedly, "We were speaking about you." "Were you?" asked Molly a little awkwardly, for Kesiah always embarrassed her. "We were both saying how much we admired your devotion to your grandfather. One rarely finds such attachment in the young to the old." "I have always loved him better than anybody except mother." "I am sure you have, and it speaks very well for both of you. We are all much interested in you, Molly." "It's kind of you to think about me," answered Molly, and her voice was constrained as it had been when she spoke in the library at Jordan's Journey.