Page:To-morrow Morning (1927).pdf/57

 flowing from her brush, green bubbles glistening and breaking. The thought of the radishes and spring onions from the garden, chill and crisp in their bowl of water on the kitchen porch, delighted her. She had to stop painting for a minute and run around the corner of the house to pull a few more radishes out of the dark earth, guiltily thrusting back one or two still white and threadlike. The twisted bellflower tree in the back yard was almost through blooming, but a few clusters of pale, wide-open flowers gleamed among the leaves, and the ground beneath it, bare because of the shade and the trampling of children's feet, was drifted over with petals. A few had floated out and lay on the vivid mossy tufts of coarse grass. That was the tree all the neighborhood children loved best, playing house under it, hanging by hooked knees from its low branches, while their faces turned purple and the little girls' skirts fell over their heads, showing gathered drawers with Hamburg edging. That was the tree that gave the children gifts—white blossoms and satiny red buds to fill their May baskets in the spring, long pale-yellow apples in the autumn, sometimes in the winter a bird's nest empty except for snow, a feather, a fragment of blue eggshell.

Kate broke off a cluster of blossoms to smell, to hold against her cheek. Why were petals always so cool? What secret of the moist darkness under the earth did they keep?

The children were leaving the Driggs's. She could