ude and joy. To Will, her presence recalled something of his
childhood, and the thought of her took its place in his mind beside that
of dawn, of running water, and of the earliest violets and lilacs. It is
the property of things seen for the first time, or for the first time
after long, like the flowers in spring, to reawaken in us the sharp edge
of sense and that impression of mystic strangeness which otherwise passes
out of life with the coming of years; but the sight of a loved face is
what renews a man's character from the fountain upwards.

One day after dinner Will took a stroll among the firs; a grave beatitude
possessed him from top to toe, and he kept smiling to himself and the
landscape as he went. The river ran between the stepping-stones with a
pretty wimple; a bird sang loudly in the wood; the hill-tops looked
immeasurably high, and as he glanced at them from time to time seemed to
contemplate his movements with a beneficent but awful curiosity. His way
took him to the eminence which overlooked the plain; and there he sat
down upon a stone, and fell into deep and pleasant thought. The plain
lay abroad with its cities and silver river; everything was asleep,
except a great eddy of birds which kept rising and falling and going
round and round in the blue air. He repeated Marjory's name aloud, and
the sound of it gratified his ear. He shut his eyes, and her image
sprang up before him, quietly luminous and attended with good thoughts.
The river might run for ever; the birds fly higher and higher till they
touched the stars. He saw it was empty bustle after all; for here,
without stirring a feet, waiting patiently in his own narrow valley, he
also had attained the better sunlight.

The next day Will made a sort of declaration across the dinner-table,
while the parson was filling his pipe.

'Miss Marjory,' he said, 'I never knew any one I liked so well as you. I
am mostly a cold, unkindly sort of man; not from want of heart, but out
of strangeness in my way of thinking; and people seem far away from me.
'Tis as if there were a circle round me, which kept every one out but
you; I can hear the others talking and laughing; but you come quite
close. Maybe, this is disagreeable to you?' he asked.

Marjory made no answer.

'Speak up, girl,' said the parson.

'Nay, now,' returned Will, 'I wouldn't press her, parson. I feel tongue-
tied myself, who am not used to it; and she's a woman, and little more
t