eave you, and probably the men won't come out for
some time. Take forty winks, you poor child, it will freshen you
up."

"I never, never go to sleep in the daytime," said Isabel firmly.
"It's a demoralizing habit. But I shouldn't mind tumbling into
your hammock, thank you very much." And, while Mrs. Clowes went
away with Barry, she slipped across to Laura's large comfortable
cot, swung waist-high between two alders that knelt on the river
brink.

Isabel sprawled luxuriously at full length, one arm under her
head and the other dropped over the netting: her young frame was
tired, little flying aches of fatigue were darting pins and
needles through her knees and shoulders and the base of her
spine. The evening was very warm and the stars winked at her,
they were green diamonds that sparkled through chinks in the
alder leafage overhead: round dark leaves like coins, and
scattered in clusters, like branches of black bloom. Near at
hand the river ran in silken blackness, but below the coppice,
where it widened into shallows, it went whispering and rippling
over a pebbly bottom on its way to the humming thunder of the
mill. And in a fir-tree not far off a nightingale was singing,
now a string of pearls dropping bead by bead from his throat, now
rich turns and grace-notes, and now again a reiterated metallic
chink which melted into liquid fluting:

Vogek im Tannenwald
Pfeifet so hell:
Pfeifet de Wald aus und ein,
wo wird mein Schatze sein?
Vogele im Tannenwald pfeifet so hell.

Isabel was still so young that she felt the beauty more deeply
when she could link it with some poetic association, and as she
listened to the nightingale she murmured to herself "'In some
melodious plot of beechen green with shadows numberless'--but
it isn't a beech, it's a fir-tree," and then wandering off into
another literary channel, "'How thick the bursts come crowding
through the leaves! Eternal passion--eternal pain' . . . but I
don't believe he feels any pain at all. It is we who feel pain.
He's not been long married, and it's lovely weather, and there's
plenty for them to eat, and they're in love . . . what a heavenly
night it is! I wish some one were in love with me. I wonder if
any one ever will be.

"How thrilling it would be to refuse him! Of course I couldn't
possibly accept him--not the first: it would be too slow,
because then one couldn't have any more. On