The Year's At The Spring

The soul, too, has its own hours of Winter and Spring. Gethsemane and Calvary may come to us in the time of roses and Easter rise upon us in a December night. How shall we know, in our own agony, of another's gladness, or, on that blessed to-morrow when the struggle is over, help someone else to bear our own forgotten pain?

True sympathy is possible only when the season of one soul accords with that of another, or else when memory, divinely tender, brings back a vivid, scarlet hour out of grey, forgotten days, to enable us to share, with another, his own full measure of sorrow or of joy.

Ah, but the world was awake at last! Javelin-like, across a field of melting snow, went a flash of blue wings, and in Madame Francesca's own garden a robin piped his cheery strain upon the topmost bough of a dripping tree.

The woman, too, was awake, in every fibre of body and soul. Even her finger-tips seemed sentient and alive; her heart was strangely lifted, as though by imprisoned wings. She had no doubt of the ultimate hour, when he would know also, yet, half-afraid, she shrank from it, as she would not have shrunk from pain.

Madame had once remarked that civilisation must have begun not earlier than nine in the morning, or later than noon. She had a horror of the early breakfast, when the family, cold, but clean, gathers itself around the board which only last night was festive and strives valiantly to be pleasant. It was almost an axiom with her that human, friendly conversation was not possible before nine in the morning.