Page:Leah Reed--Brenda's summer at Rockley.djvu/206

190 Amy could not help laughing at his expression of amazement.

“Well, the person who reads it will have to decide whether it is poetry. I should n’t like to say myself. But I’m trying to tell a story in verse, and some way it does n’t come out right.”

“Let me hear it,” said Fritz, “and I ’ll tell you what the matter is.” His tone was one of extreme confidence,  and, of course, having let the cat out of the bag, as she  had never meant to do, there was nothing now for Amy  but to give Fritz the chance to hear what she had written.

The story was a romantic one about a young man who had walked in a garden with a girl he admired, for whom  he had gathered a rose which she accepted warmly. Then came the catastrophe,—

“He was mighty sure he’d be killed, was n’t he?” said Fritz. “But go on,” for Amy began to close her blank book.

So Amy read the stanza in which the young soldier’s death was described, and then she came to the climax, which, in her secret heart, she considered very fine.