That year, spring seemed to break over the village in a day, like a green flood.  All at once people’s thoughts were interrupted, and their eyes turned from selfish joys or pains by the emerald flash of fields and hill-sides in the morning sun, and the white flutter of flowering boughs past their windows like the festal garments of unexpected guests.

The first week in May, the cherry-trees were in blossom, and the alders and shad bushes were white in the borders of the woods against the filmy green of the birches.  The young women got out their summer muslins, and trimmed their bonnets anew; their faces, all unknown to themselves, took on a new meaning of the spring, like new flowers, and the young men looked after them as they passed as if they were strangers in the village.

On the afternoon of Wednesday, in the first week of May, Eugene Hautville strolled across-lots over to the village.  Through the fields north of the Hautville place there was an old foot-path to the former site of an old homestead, long ago burned to the ground and its ashes dissipated on winds long died away.  The oldest inhabitants in the village barely remembered the house that used to stand there.  The slant of its roof crossed their minds dimly when they spoke of it:  they could not agree as to whether it had faced north or south.  It might have seemed almost fabulous, had it not been for the thicket of old lilacs purpling with bloom every spring, which had first grown before its windows, and the perennial houseleek which had clustered round the door.

Then, too, east of where the house had stood there was an old apple orchard, the trees thereof bent to the ground like distorted old men, and, when spring came, bearing scarcely one bough of pink bloom, among others shaggy with gray moss like the beard of age.

Then, also, the lane still remained which had stretched, in days gone by, from the northward of the old house to the highway.  The lane had divided the fields of the old landowners, and had been the thoroughfare for the dwellers in the house when they went to meeting and to mill.

The Hautvilles often used it in the summer-time for a short-cut to the village.  Eugene went along this foot-path, which was in its way a little humble track of history of simple village life, passed the site of the house, and then struck into the lane.  It stretched before him like a shaft of green light.  The afternoon sun shone through young willow-leaves, transparent like green glass.  Low overhead hung rosy tassels from out-reaching boughs of maples.  Between the trees, the flowering alders seemed gleaming out of sight before him like the white skirts of maidens.  Here and there the ground was blue with violets.  Eugene picked some half mechanically, as he went along, and made a little nosegay, with some sprigs of alder.  He was half through the lane, and had just emerged from a clump of alders, when he saw Dorothy Fair coming.