He was not yet sure whether he would go to the party, but he would at least be ready with an offering should the fates, when the time arrived, seem propitious.Sooner than he had expected the can was filled, and he lay back on the sweet-smelling turf of the meadow and gazed up at the blue of the sky, watching the tiny, lazy, gauzy clouds that floated slowly, drifting like thistledown. It was easy to feel he was floating on one of them, drifting, too. He often did that. It was his way of reading poetry. He read a great deal of living poetry at that stage of his existence.Lying so with a clump of blue violets close to his hand and the tinkle of a cowbell not far away, he could drift and think of a great many things that an ordinary boy in the everyday of life wouldn’t consider profitable for one of his standing.Out of the corner of his eye he saw the minister going in the white gate between the hedges. He thought of the little grave covered with violets and the young mother, a social outcast, with her new sorrow and bewilderment in her face.
