the green saplings nodded their heads. Flowers, and the bedded
moss, and the little stream that leaped from a precipice of three feet
into the calm of a hand-deep pool spoke to her. She was happy. Gone was
the house and its inmates; gone Paris the schoolmaster, who had taught her
to write, and whose hand touching hers in guidance made her sick and cold;
gone Hugon the trader, whom she feared and hated. Here were no toil, no
annoy, no frightened flutterings of the heart; she had passed the
frontier, and was safe in her own land.

She pressed her cheek against the dead leaves, and, with the smell of the
earth in her nostrils, looked sideways with half-closed eyes and made a
radiant mist of the forest round about. A drowsy warmth was in the air;
the birds sang far away; through a rift in the foliage a sunbeam came and
rested beside her like A gilded snake.

For a time, wrapped in the warmth and the green and gold mist, she lay as
quiet as the sunbeam; of the earth earthy, in pact with the mould beneath
the leaves, with the slowly crescent trunks, brown or silver-gray, with
moss and lichened rock, and with all life that basked or crept or flew. At
last, however, the mind aroused, and she opened her eyes, saw, and thought
of what she saw. It was pleasant in the forest. She watched the flash of a
bird, as blue as the sky, from limb to limb; she listened to the elfin
waterfall; she drew herself with hand and arm across the leaves to the
edge of the pale brown ring, plucked a honeysuckle bough and brought it
back to the silver column of the beech; and lastly, glancing up from the
rosy sprig within her hand, she saw a man coming toward her, down the path
that she had thought hidden, holding his arm before him for shield against
brier and branch, and looking curiously about him as for a thing which he
had come out to seek.

CHAPTER VIII

UNDER THE GREENWOOD TREE

In the moment in which she sprang to her feet she saw that it was not
Hugon, and her heart grew calm again. In her torn gown, with her brown
hair loosed from its fastenings, and falling over her shoulders in heavy
waves whose crests caught the sunlight, she stood against the tree beneath
which she had lain, gazed with wide-open eyes at the intruder, and guessed
from his fine coat and the sparkling toy looping his hat that he was a
gentleman. She knew gentlemen when she saw them: on a time one had cursed
her for scurrying like a partridge across the road befo