The stony road wound around the spur of the hill, and was visible here and there, in its slopes and turnings on the way to the village, light buff between the many-colored bordering of foliage.  The winding valley looked like Nature’s color-box; the tall hills beyond, sleeping beneath their Persian shawls, contrasted richly with the cool pearl-gray of the lower sky behind them.  Away to the right, though seemingly nearer than from the road below, rose the white steeple of the meeting-house, and, peeping out around it, the roofs and gable-ends of the village houses.

“There could not be a more lovely place to be happy in!” said Sophie, sighing from excess of pleasure.

“Any place is as lovely as another when you’re in love, I suppose,” remarked her sister; “that is, if being in love is as nice as poets say it is.”

Sophie looked around with a smile, implying that the best description a poet ever wrote could give but a faint impression of the reality.

“But,” pursued Cornelia, “don’t you find it very stupid when he’s away?  The happier you are with him, the unhappier you’d be without him, I should think.”

“Oh, no, dear!” returned Sophie.  “I’m happy mostly, because I know he cares for me more than for any one else in the world, and because I know he’s one of the best and truest of men.  I can feel that, you know, just as much when he’s at Abbie’s, as when he’s here.  The happiness of love isn’t all in seeing and hearing, and—­all that tangible part.”

“Don’t it make any difference, then, if you never Bee one another from the day you’re engaged until you’re married?”

Sophie began to blush, as she generally did when called upon to speak of her love.  “Of course, it’s delicious to be together,” said she, “and it would be very sad if we could not meet.  But it would be more sad to think that our love depended on meeting.”

“Well, it may be so to you,” returned Cornelia, picking lichens from the rock and crushing them between her rounded fingers; “but my idea is that the whole object of being engaged and married is to be together all the time.  I don’t see what on earth we are made visible and tangible for, unless to be seen and touched by the persons we love.”

Sophie looked distressed, and a little embarrassed.

“You can’t think our bodies are the most important part of us, Neelie, dear?  It’s our souls that love and are loved, you know.  How could we love in heaven if it were not so?”

“Oh, I don’t know any thing about that.  It’s love in this world I’m speaking of.  I believe it has as much to do with flesh and blood, as an instrument has with the music that it makes.  What would become of the music if it wasn’t for the instrument?”