on of reed sparrows and
warblers were delightfully restless, twittering and chuckling as the wash
of the boats stirred the reeds from the water upwards in the still, hot
morning.

She smiled with pleasure, and her lazy enjoyment of the new scene seemed
to bring out her beauty doubly as she leaned back amidst the cushions,
though she was far from languid; her idleness being the idleness of a
person, strong and well-knit both in body and mind, deliberately resting.

"Look!" she said, springing up suddenly from her place without any
obvious effort, and balancing herself with exquisite grace and ease;
"look at the beautiful old bridge ahead!"

"I need scarcely look at that," said I, not turning my head away from her
beauty. "I know what it is; though" (with a smile) "we used not to call
it the Old Bridge time agone."

She looked down upon me kindly, and said, "How well we get on now you are
no longer on your guard against me!"

And she stood looking thoughtfully at me still, till she had to sit down
as we passed under the middle one of the row of little pointed arches of
the oldest bridge across the Thames.

"O the beautiful fields!" she said; "I had no idea of the charm of a very
small river like this. The smallness of the scale of everything, the
short reaches, and the speedy change of the banks, give one a feeling of
going somewhere, of coming to something strange, a feeling of adventure
which I have not felt in bigger waters."

I looked up at her delightedly; for her voice, saying the very thing
which I was thinking, was like a caress to me. She caught my eye and her
cheeks reddened under their tan, and she said simply:

"I must tell you, my friend, that when my father leaves the Thames this
summer he will take me away to a place near the Roman wall in Cumberland;
so that this voyage of mine is farewell to the south; of course with my
goodwill in a way; and yet I am sorry for it. I hadn't the heart to tell
Dick yesterday that we were as good as gone from the Thames-side; but
somehow to you I must needs tell it."

She stopped and seemed very thoughtful for awhile, and then said smiling:

"I must say that I don't like moving about from one home to another; one
gets so pleasantly used to all the detail of the life about one; it fits
so harmoniously and happily into one's own life, that beginning again,
even in a small way, is a kind of pain. But I daresay in the country
which you come from, you would think