The fields lay rich in brown seams, where the plough had newly furrowed them.  Farmers were throwing in seed of barley and spring wheat.  The cattle were standing in the low sunshine, in barn-doors and milking-yards.  Sheep were browsing the little buds on the pasture bushes.

The April day would soon be over.  To-morrow might bring a cold wind, perhaps; but the winter had been long and hard; and after such, we believe in the spring pleasantness when it comes.

“What a little way brings us into a different world!” said Sylvie as they rode along.  “Just back there in the city, you can hardly believe in these hills.”

Her own words reminded her.

“I suppose we shall find, sometime,” she said gently, “that the other world is only a little way out.”

“I’ve been very sorry for you, Sylvie,” said Rodney.  “I hope you know that.”

His slight abruptness told her how the thought had been ready and pressing for speech, underneath all their casual talk.

And he had dropped the prefix from her name.

He had not meant to, but he could not go back and put it on.  It was another little falling out that he could not help.  The things he could not help were the most comfortable.

“Mother would have had a very hard time if she had lived,” said Sylvie.  “I am glad for her.  It was a great deal better.  And it came so tenderly!  I had dreaded sickness and pain for her.”

“It has been all hard for you.  I hope it will be easier now.  I hope it will always be easier.”

“I am going to live with Mrs. Kirkbright,” said Sylvie.

“Tell me about my new aunt,” said Rodney.

Sylvie was glad to go on about Desire, about the wedding, about Hill-hope, and the plans for living there.

“I think it will be almost like heaven,” she said.  “It will be home and happiness; all that people look forward to for themselves.  And yet, right alongside, there will be the work and the help.  It will open right out into it, as heaven does into earth.  Mr. Kirkbright is a grand man.”

“Yes.  He’s one of the ten-talent people.  But I suppose we can all do something.  It is good to have some little one-horse teams for the light jobs.”

“I never could be Desire,” said Sylvie.  “But I am glad, to work with her.  I am glad to live one of the little lives.”

There would always be a boy and girl simpleness between these two, and in their taking of the world together.  And that is good for the world, as well.  It cannot be all made of mountains.  If all were high and grand, it would be as if nothing were.  Heaven itself is not built like that.

“There goes some of Uncle Christopher’s stuff, I suppose,” said Rodney, a while afterward, as they came to the top of a long ascent.  He pointed to a great loaded wain that stood with its three powerful horses on the crest of a forward hill.  It was piled high up with tiling and drain-pipe, packed with straw.  The long cylinders showed their round mouths behind, like the mouths of cannon.