CHAPTER XXXII.

EASTER LILIES.

Bright, soft days began to come; days in which windows stood open, and pots of plants were set out on the window-sills; days alternating as in the long, New England spring they always do, with bleak intervals of sharp winds and cold sea-storms; yet giving sweet anticipation tenderly, as a mother gives beforehand that which she cannot find in her heart to keep back till the birthday.  That is the charm of Nature with us; the motherliness in her that offsets, and breaks through with loving impulse, her rule of rigidness.  The year comes slowly to its growth, but she relaxes toward it with a kind of pity, and says, “There, take this!  It isn’t time for it, but you needn’t wait for everything till you’re grown up!”

People feel happy, in advance of all their hopes and realizations, on such days; the ripeness of the year, in whatever good it may be making for them, touches them like the soft air that blows up from the south.  There is a new look on men’s and women’s faces as you meet them in the street; a New Jerusalem sort of look; the heavens are opened upon them, and the divineness of sunshine flows in through sense and spirit.

Sylvie Argenter was very peaceful.  She told Desire that she never would be afraid again in all her life; she knew how things were measured, now.  She was “so glad the money had almost all been spent while mother lived; that not a dollar that could buy her a comfort had been kept back.”

She was quite content to stay now; at least till Rachel Froke should come; she was busily helping Desire with her wedding outfit.  She was willing to receive from her the fair wages of a seamstress, now that she could freely give her time, and there was no one to accept and use an invalid’s expensive luxuries.

Desire would not have thought it needful that hundreds of extra yards of cambric and linen should be made up for her, simply because she was going to be married, if it had not been that her marriage was to be so especially a beginning of new life and work, in which she did not wish to be crippled by any present care for self.

“I see the sense of it now, so far as concerns quantity; as for quality, I will have nothing different from what I have always had.”

There was no trousseau to exhibit; there were only trunks-full of good plenishing that would last for years.

Sylvie cut out, and parceled.  Elise Mokey, and one or two other girls who had had only precarious employment and Committee “relief” since the fire, had the stitching given them to do; and every tuck and hem was justly paid for.  When the work came back from their hands, Sylvie finished and marked delicately.

She had the sunny little room, now, over the gray parlor, adjoining Desire’s own.  The white box lay upon a round, damask-covered-stand in the corner, under her mother’s picture painted in the graceful days of the gray silks and llama laces; and around this, drooping and trailing till they touched the little table and veiled the box that held the beautiful secret,—­seeming to say, “We know it too, for we are a part,”—­wreathed the shining sprays of blossomy fern.