Audrey

"What is that crested bird upon yonder bough," she asked,--"the one that

gave the piercing cry?"

"A kingfisher," he answered, "and cousin to the halcyon of the ancients.

If, when next you go to sea, you take its feathers with you, you need have

no fear of storms."

A tree, leafless, but purplish pink with bloom, leaned from the bank above

them. He broke a branch and gave it to her. "It is the Judas-tree," he

told her. "Iscariot hanged himself thereon."

Around the trunk of a beech a lizard ran like a green flame, and they

heard the distant barking of a fox. Large white butterflies went past

them, and a hummingbird whirred into the heart of a wild honeysuckle that

had hasted to bloom. "How different from the English forests!" she said.

"I could love these best. What are all those broad-leaved plants with the

white, waxen flowers?"

"May-apples. Some call them mandrakes, but they do not rise shrieking, nor

kill the wight that plucks them. Will you have me gather them for you?"

"I will not trouble you," she answered, and presently turned aside to pull

them for herself.

He looked at the graceful, bending figure and lifted his brows; then,

quickening his pace until he was up with the coach, he spoke to the negro

upon the box. "Tyre, drive on to that big pine, and wait there for your

mistress and me. Sidon,"--to the footman,--"get down and take my horse. If

your master wakes, tell him that Mistress Evelyn tired of the coach, and

that I am picking her a nosegay."

Tyre and Sidon, Haward's steed, the four black coach horses, the

vermilion-and-cream coach, and the slumbering Colonel, all made a progress

of an hundred yards to the pine-tree, where the cortége came to a halt.

Mistress Evelyn looked up from the flower-gathering to find the road bare

before her, and Haward, sitting upon a log, watching her with something

between a smile and a frown.

"You think that I, also, weigh true love by the weight of the purse," he

said. "I do not care overmuch for your gold, Evelyn."

She did not answer at once, but stood with her head slightly bent,

fingering the waxen flowers with a delicate, lingering touch. Now that

there was no longer the noise of the wheels and the horses' hoofs, the

forest stillness, which is composed of sound, made itself felt. The call

of birds, the whir of insects, the murmur of the wind in the treetops,

low, grave, incessant, and eternal as the sound of the sea, joined

themselves to the slow waves of fragrance, the stretch of road whereon

nothing moved, the sunlight lying on the earth, and made a spacious quiet.