time of year—we can put our raincoats over us to keep off the dew. Why not?”
Ilse looked at the haystack in the corner of the little pasture—and began to laugh assentingly.
“What will Aunt Ruth say?”
“Aunt Ruth need never know it. I'll be sly for once with a vengeance. Besides, I’ve always longed to sleep out in the open. It’s been one of the secret wishes I believed were for ever unattainable, hedged about as I am with aunts. And now it has tumbled into my lap like a gift thrown down by the gods. It’s really such good luck as to be uncanny.”
“Suppose it rains,” said Ilse, who, nevertheless, found the idea very alluring.
“It won’t rain—there isn’t a cloud in sight except those great fluffy rose-and-white ones piling up over Indian Head. They’re the kind of clouds that always make me feel that I’d love to soar up on wings as eagles and swoop right down into the middle of them.”
It was easy to ascend the little haystack. They sank down on its top with sighs of content, realising that they were tireder than they had thought. The stack was built of the wild, fragrant grasses of the little pasture, and yielded an indescribably alluring aroma, such as no cultivated clover can give. They could see nothing but a great sky of faint rose above them, pricked with early stars, and the dim fringe of tree-tops around the field. Bats and swallows swooped darkly above them against the paling western gold—delicate fragrances exhaled from the mosses and ferns just over the fence under the trees—a couple of aspen poplars in the corner talked in silvery whispers, of the gossip of the woods. They laughed together in sheer lawless pleasure. An ancient enchantment was suddenly upon them, and the white magic of the sky and the dark magic of the woods wove the final spell of a potent incantation.
“Such loveliness as this doesn’t seem real,” murmured Emily. “It’s so wonderful it hurts me. I’m afraid to
