a hope of his been fulfilled, never had an event fallen out as he had planned it, never had a prayer brought him the blessing for which he had prayed.  Nothing in all his seventy years had been just what he had wanted—­not just what he would have chosen if the choice had been granted him—­yet the sight of the birds in the apple trees stirred something in his heart to-day that was less an individual note of rejoicing than a share in the undivided movement of life which was pulsing around him.  Nothing that had ever happened to him as Reuben Merryweather would he care to live over; but he was glad at the end that he had been a part of the spring and had not missed seeing the little green leaves break out in the orchard.

And then while he sat there, half dreaming and half awake, the stillness grew suddenly full of the singing of blue birds.  Spring blossomed radiantly beneath his eyes, and the faint green and gold of the meadows blazed forth in a pageant of colour.

“I’m glad I didn’t miss it,” he thought.  “That’s the most that can be said, I reckon—­I’m glad I didn’t miss it.”

The old hound, dreaming of flies, flapped his long ears in the sunshine, and a robin, hopping warily toward a plate of seed-cakes on the arm of Reuben’s chair, winged back for a minute before he alighted suspiciously on the railing.  Then, being an old and a wise bird, he advanced again, holding his head slightly sideways and regarding the sleeping man with a pair of bright, inquisitive eyes.  Reassured at last by the silence, he uttered a soft, throaty note, and flew straight to the arm of the chair in which Reuben was sitting.  With his glance roving from the quiet man to the quiet dog, he made a few tentative flutters toward the plate of cake.  Then, gathering courage from the adventure, he hopped deliberately into the centre of the plate and began pecking greedily at the scattered crumbs.

CHAPTER XIX

TREATS OF CONTRADICTIONS

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.