ff as soon as you like; I'm ready to do anything that
will please you'; which was untrue, but it was useless to tell him so. I
sighed at my sad gift of penetration, and tossed the fresh example of it
into the treasury of vanity.

'Temple,' said I, dissembling a little; 'I tell you candidly: you won't
please me by doing anything disagreeable to you. A dog pulled by the
collar is not much of a companion. I start for Julia to-morrow before
daylight. If you like your bed best, stop there; and mind you amuse Janet
for me duing my absence.'

'I'm not going to let any one make comparisons between us,' Temple
muttered.

He dropped dozens of similar remarks, and sometimes talked downright
flattery, I had so deeply impressed him.

We breakfasted by candle-light, and rode away on a frosty foggy morning,
keeping our groom fifty yards to the rear, a laughable sight, with both
his coat-pockets bulging, a couple of Riversley turnover pasties in one,
and a bottle of champagne in the other, for our lunch on the road. Now
and then, when near him, we galloped for the fun of seeing him nurse the
bottle-pocket. He was generally invisible. Temple did not think it
strange that we should be riding out in an unknown world with only a
little ring, half a stone's-throw clear around us, and blots of copse,
and queer vanishing cottages, and hard grey meadows, fir-trees
wonderfully magnified, and larches and birches rigged like fairy ships,
all starting up to us as we passed, and melting instantly. One could have
fancied the fir-trees black torches. And here the shoulder of a hill
invited us to race up to the ridge: some way on we came to crossroads,
careless of our luck in hitting the right one: yonder hung a village
church in the air, and church-steeple piercing ever so high; and out of
the heart of the mist leaped a brook, and to hear it at one moment, and
then to have the sharp freezing silence in one's ear, was piercingly
weird. It all tossed the mind in my head like hay on a pitchfork. I
forgot the existence of everything but what I loved passionately,--and
that had no shape, was like a wind.

Up on a knoll of firs in the middle of a heath, glowing rosy in the
frost, we dismounted to lunch, leaning against the warm saddles, Temple
and I, and Uberly, our groom, who reminded me of a certain tramp of my
acquaintance in his decided preference of beer to champagne; he drank,
though, and sparkled after his draught. No sooner were we on horsebac