“Isn’t it jolly to be good sisters again?” exclaimed Rae. “I feel like that verse in the Bible where all the morning stars sang together. It’s just been horrid…horrid. How could I have been such a little fool? I just wallowed in self-pity all the fall and then it seemed as if that outburst had to come. And all over that…that creature! I’m so ashamed of ever dreaming I cared for him. I can’t understand how I could have been so…so fantastic. And yet I really did have a terrible case. Of course I knew perfectly well in my heart it could never come to anything. At the very worst of my infatuation…when I was trying to pretend to everyone I didn’t care a speck…I knew no Silver Bush girl could ever marry a go-preacher. But that didn’t prevent me from being crazy about him. It seemed so romantic…a hopeless love, you know. Two fond souls forever sundered by family pride and all that, you know. I just reveled in it…I can see that now. The way he used to look at me across that barn! And once, when he read his text…‘Behold thou art fair, my love, behold thou art fair. Thou hast dove’s eyes’…he looked right at me and I nearly died of rapture. He really was in love with me then. You never saw the poem he wrote me, Pat. He was jealous of everything, it seemed…of ‘the wind that whispered in my ear’…of ‘the sunshine that played on my hair’…of ‘the moonbeam that lay on my pillow.’ The lines didn’t scan very well and the rhymes limped but I thought it was a masterpiece. Can you wonder I was furious when you just stepped in and lifted him under my very nose? By the way, he’s married, did you know, Pat?”

“Yes. I saw it in the paper.”

“Oh, he sent me an announcement,” giggled Rae. “You should have seen it. With scrolls of forget-me-nots around the border! If I hadn’t been cured before that would have cured me. Pat, why is it written in the stars that girls have to make fools of themselves.”

“We were both geese,” said Pat.

“Let’s blame it all on the moon,” said Rae.

They felt very near to each other. And then Judy came in with cups of delicious hot cocoa for them and a “liddle bite” of Bishop’s bread and a handful of raisins as if they were children again.

“Just think,” said Pat, “to other people this day has been only Wednesday. To me it’s the day you came home…home to me…back into my life. It may be March still by the calendar but it’s April in my heart…April full of spring song.”