Mrs. Scherman said she had really never had so little trouble with a baby as with this one, who had nobody especially appointed to make out her own necessity by constant “tending.”

Bel did not go down-stairs again.  She could do better here than with Kate sitting opposite, aware of all her scratches and poetical predicaments.

An hour went by.  Bel was hardly equal yet to five-minute Crambo; and besides, she was doing her best; trying to put something clearly into syllables that said itself, unsyllabled, to her.

She did not hear Mrs. Scherman when she came up the stairs.  She had just read over to herself the five completed stanzas of her poem.

It had really come.  It was as if a violet had been born to actual bloom from the thought, the intangible vision of one.  She wondered at the phrasing, marveling how those particular words had come and ranged themselves at her call.  She did not know how she had done it, or whether she herself had done it at all.  She began almost to think she must have read it before somewhere.  Had she just picked it up out of her memory?  Was it a borrowing, a mimicry, a patchwork?

But it was very pretty, very sweet!  It told her own feelings over to her, with more that she had not known she had felt or perceived.  She read it again from beginning to end in a whisper.  Her mouth was bright with a smile and her eyes with tears when she had ended.

Asenath Scherman with her light step came in and stood beside her.

“Won’t you tell me?” the sweet, gracious voice demanded.

Bel Bree looked up.

“I thought I’d try, in fun,” she said, “and it came in real earnest.”

Asenath forgot that the face turned up to hers, with the smile and the tears and the color in it, was the face of her hired servant.  A lovely soul, all alight with thought and gladness, met her through it.

She bent down and touched Bel’s forehead with her lady-lips.

Bel put the little scribbled paper in her hand, and ran away, up-stairs.

“Will you give it to me, Bel, and let me do what I please with it?”—­Mrs. Scherman went to Bel and asked next day.

Bel blushed.  She had been a little frightened in the morning to think of what had happened over night.  She could not quite recollect all the words of her verses, and she wondered if they were really as pretty as she had fancied in the moment of making them.

All she could answer was that Mrs. Scherman was “very kind.”

“Then you’ll trust me?”

And Bel, wondering very much, but too shy to question, said she would.

A few days after that, Asenath called her up-stairs.  The postman had rung five minutes before, and Kate had carried up a note.

“We were just in time with our little spring song,” she said. “Bluebirds have to sing early; at least a month beforehand.  See here!  Is this all right?” and she put into Bel’s hand a little roughish slip of paper, upon which was printed:—­