"Oh," she said graciously, "if you put it in that way I could not refuse."
"May we bring our guns?" asked Donald from the piazza.
"May I bring my net?" I added, half amused, half annoyed.
She made a gesture, indifferent, condescending.
"Dear me!" murmured the aunts in chorus from the piazza as we trooped after the Aspen beauty, "Sweetheart is growing very fast."
I smiled vaguely at Sweetheart. I was wondering how she would look in long frocks and coiled hair.
II.
In the fall of the year the meadows of Aspen glimmer in the sunlight like crumpled sheets of beaten gold; for Aspen is the land of golden-rod, of yellow earth and gilded fern.
There the crisp oaks rustle, every leaf a blot of yellow; there the burnished pines sound, sound, tremble, and resound, like gilt-stringed harps aquiver in the wind.
Sweet fern, sun-dried, bronzed, fills all the hills with incense, vague and delicate as the white down drifting from the frothy milkweed.
And where the meadow brook prattled, limpid, filtered with sunlight, Sweetheart stood knee-deep in fragrant mint, watching the aimless minnows swimming in circles. On a dis-
