large
handkerchief. "This is a favourite pool of mine, I often sit
here when I come this way. I never saw such beautiful dragonflies,
did you? They must be nearly as big as hummingbirds."

Over the brown mirror of the pool a troop of great dragonflies
were ceaselessly darting to and fro, their metallic wings making
a faint whirr as they looped in blinding mazes through the air
that glowed blue with their splendour. "Very beautiful," said
Lawrence.

"Are you out for a walk? I'm on my way to Wancote." Here panic
fell on Isabel, the panic that lies in wait for young girls: if
he were to think she thought he ought to offer to escort her!
"I'm late, I must go on now. Good-bye!"

Lawrence stood looking down at her, impassive, almost sombre, but
for the hot glow in his eyes. His caution had gone overboard.
"Mayn't I come too?"

"Oh. . . ."

"Do let me."

"If you--if you like."

The valley narrowed as it receded, the upland air began to
sparkle with a myriad prismatic needles that glittered from the
wings of flies and beetles, and from dewdrops on patches of turf
still as grey as hoarfrost in the shadow on the edge of a wood,
and from wayside hollies whose leaf-points were all starred in
silver. The blue bow overhead was stainless, not a cloud in it
nor a mist: azure, azure, and unfathomable, like the heart of
man, or the justice of God.--Isabel was not shy now but alert
and radiant, as if she had caught a sparkle from the air: and
expansive, as women are when they are sure of pleasing. "'For
the jaded man of the world at her side, the young girl's rustic
freshness was her chief charm. She was so different from the
beautiful but heartless mondaines he had known in Town. No
diamonds glittered round her slender throat, and her hands,
though small and well-shaped, were tanned by the summer sun. But
for the jaded-man-of-the-world, weary of sparkling epigram or
caustic repartee, her simple chatter held a fascination of its
own.' I don't believe," reflected Isabel, coming down mentally to
plain prose, "he'd mind if I talked to him about the dinner or
last week's washing bill."

She did not in fact enter on any such intimate topic, but
conversed sedately about parish politics and the beauties of the
Plain. "This is a very lonely part," she said, "there are
scarcely any houses. I'm taking the magazine to one of Major
Clowes' shepherds. It's rather interesting going there. He's
mad."

"Mad!"

"As a Ma