Her eyes were bent away off toward the Franconia hills, when Mrs.
Linceford leaned round to look in them, and spoke, in the tone her voice
had begun to take toward her. She felt one of her strong likings--her
immense fancies, as she called them, which were really warm sympathies
of the best of her with the best she found in the world--for Leslie
Goldthwaite.
"It seems to me you are a _stray_ sunbeam this morning," she said, in
her winning way. "What kind of thoughts are going out so far? What is it
all about?"
A verse of the Psalms was ringing itself in Leslie's mind; had been
there, under all the other vague musings and chance suggestions for many
minutes of her silence. But she would not have spoken it--she _could_
not--for all the world. She gave the lady one of the chance suggestions
instead. "I have been looking down into that lovely hollow; it seems
like a children's party, with all the grave, grown folks looking on."
"Childhood and grown-up-hood; not a bad simile."
It was not, indeed. It was a wild basin, within a group of the lesser
hills close by; full of little feathery birches, that twinkled and
played in the light breeze and gorgeous sunshine slanting in upon them
between the slopes that lay in shadow above,--slopes clothed with ranks
of dark pines and cedars and hemlocks, looking down seriously, yet with
a sort of protecting tenderness, upon the shimmer and frolic they seemed
to have climbed up out of.
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