tongue. He could merely swoon in the sweet, pervasive odour of cookies.
One morning Leila was absent, and the world grew grey. Day after day her seat remained vacant, and Paul took to walking by the river, casting furtive glances at the windows of the white cottage on the bluff where Leila lived. There was no sign of her and he would go back to the fields behind Aunt Verona's house and say comforting things to his patient "secrets." Then one day Miss Ranston, in a queer voice, told them that Leila Meddar would never come back to school, for she had been ill and God had taken her up into heaven where she would not have to suffer any more.
He walked from the schoolhouse in a daze, his thoughts floating high like balloons, trying to find some resting-place in his clouded knowledge concerning the other world. He took it for granted that Leila was "saved" and would go—perhaps had gone, even before the funeral—to the region of pearl and jasper which his mother and father and Uncle Isaiah and Becky States's little black boy inhabited. The light of his love for Leila was absorbed into the refulgence of this new experience, so palpitatingly mysterious, so gloriously awful. For a while he picked clover and buttercups and daisies, on a nameless urge, and wandered from secret to secret, as if to cull the images of Leila and rebreathe the ethereal odour of cookies. With flowers still in his hand he walked across the meadow and down the road toward Gritty Kestrell's brown house, over which clambered spreading vines of blue clematis. Gritty was not in sight, but in front of the carpenter shop, at the foot of the silvery, creaking windmill, Mr. Kestrell was planing a board in an intent manner which made Paul sure that his activity was in some way associated with Leila.
After supper Aunt Verona said illuminating things about sickness and dying, then accompanied him to his
