Page:Saxe Holm's Stories, Series Two.djvu/190

180 perched like a bird, kissing him over and over. Then she said, more gravely: "Brother Jim did n't say you were my brother. He said you were just the same as my brother. There is n't any same as brother about kisses."

Oh, marvelous maid-child of eleven! Jim laughed, but I had a strange sense of pain in the child's words, and I waited sorely for days and days, for her to kiss me, spontaneously and freely as she kissed Jim. The Indian summer lingered late and long. The maples turned scarlet and gold, the ash-trees to purple and yellow, till the forests outvied the sunrise and sunset. Little Alice had never seen this sight. It gave her delight so great that it bordered on pain. Day after day she filled the house with the bright boughs. Not a corner, hardly a chair, but had the glittering leaves lying in it; it was as if they floated down among us through the roof; and Ally was never seen without them in her hand, or placed fantastically around her belt or in her hair. It grieved her very heart that they must die.

"Oh, why do they not stay on all the winter, brother Jim?" she said. "Why can they not be this color all summer? I suppose God likes green best? Is there any other world where He lets the trees be red and yellow all the time?"

One afternoon, we were returning very late from a ramble in the woods, now nearly leafless. Ally