am of sunlight over the thick
floor of moss, up against the fir-stems. The chaffinch and the linnet
flitted off the grey orchard twigs, singing from new stations; and the
bee seemed to come questioning the silence of the woods and droning
disappointed away. The first excess of any sad feeling is half voluntary.
Emilia could not help smiling, when she lifted her head out of a musing
fit, to find that she had composed part of a minuet for the languid
dancing motes in the shaft of golden light at her feet. "Can I remember
it?" she thought, and forgot the incident with the effort.

Down at her right hand, bordering a water, stood a sallow, a dead tree,
channelled inside with the brown trail of a goat-moth. Looking in this
direction, she saw Cornelia advancing to the tree. When the lady had
reached it, she drew a little book from her bosom, kissed it, and dropped
it in the hollow. This done, she passed among the firs. Emilia had
perceived that she was agitated: and with that strange instinct of hearts
beginning to stir, which makes them divine at once where they will come
upon the secret of their own sensations, she ran down to the tree and
peered on tiptoe at the embedded volume. On a blank page stood pencilled:
"This is the last fruit of the tree. Come not to gather more." There was
no meaning for her in that sentimental chord but she must have got some
glimpse of a meaning; for now, as in an agony, her lips fashioned the
words: "If I forget his face I may as well die;" and she wandered on,
striving more and more vainly to call up his features. The--"Does he
think of me?" and--"What am I to him?"--such timorous little feather-play
of feminine emotion she knew nothing of: in her heart was the strong
flood of a passion.

She met Edward Buxley and Freshfield Sumner at a cross-path, on their way
to Brookfield; and then Adela joined the party, which soon embraced Mr.
Barrett, and subsequently Cornelia. All moved on in a humming leisure,
chattering by fits. Mr. Sumner was delicately prepared to encounter Mrs.
Chump, "whom," said Adela, "Edward himself finds it impossible to
caricature;" and she affected to laugh at the woman.

"Happy the pencil that can reproduce!" Mr. Barrett exclaimed; and,
meeting his smile, Cornelia said: "Do you know, my feeling is, and I
cannot at all account for it, that if she were a Catholic she would not
seem so gross?"

"Some of the poetry of that religion would descend upon her, possibly,"
return