Her hand went down to her right foot.
She drew off her shoes. Then she drew off her stockings.
By this time she was in a nervous flurry. Almost you may say that
she raced across the stream and clutched at a handful of the
columbines. In less than a minute she was back again, gazing
timorously about her.
No one had seen; nobody, that is to say, except the finch, and he
piped on cavalierly. Miss Marty glanced up at him, then at a
clearing of green turf underneath his bough, a little to her left.
Why not? Why should she omit any of May morning's rites?
Miss Marty picked up her skirts again, stepped on to the green turf,
and began to dabble her feet in the dew.
"The morn that May began,
I dabbled in the dew;
And I wished for me a proper young man
In coat-tails of the blue. . . ."
"_Whoop! Whoo-oop!_"
The cry came from afar; indeed, from the woods across the river.
Yet as the hare pricks up her ears at the sound of a distant horn and
darts away to the covert, so did Miss Marty pause, and, after
listening for a second or two, hurry back to the log to resume her
shoes and stockings.
Her shoes she found where she had left them, and one stocking on the
rank grass close beside them. _But where was the other?_
She looked to right, to left, and all around her in a panic.
Could she have dropped it into the stream in her hurry? And had the
stream carried it down the fall?
She drew on one stocking and shoe, and catching up the other shoe in
her hand, crept down to explore.
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