id of them by turning them into a picture; and that's the
result. Rather like Eldred and me! He's always dragging me up on to
higher ground: yet he's so divinely unconscious of it all the time."

"Dear fellow!" Honor said softly. "But _he_ hasn't done all the
lifting. You've made a new man of him, Quita."

"Have I?" Sudden seriousness shadowed her eyes. "It was the least I
could do, . . considering all things. Only . . I wish he wasn't quite
so inward; so in love with his own company."

"You'll change that, in time."

"Do you think so? I wonder."

She bent in speaking to look through three or four small canvases that
stood with their faces to the wall.

"I want to show you the pair to my Up-Hill picture. It's another
Rossetti, _Amor Mundi_; and the contrast pleases me. I've taken the
opening lines:

"'Oh where are you going, with your love-locks flowing,
On the west wind blowing, along this valley track?'
'The down-hill path is easy; come with me, an' it please ye;
We shall escape the up-hill, by never turning back.'
So they two went together, in glowing August weather,
The honey-breathing heather lay to their left and right . .'

There now, can't you see them going down and down . . . ?"

With a quick turn of the wrist she brought the picture into view, and
set it on the table in a good light.

"Can't you feel the soft wind against their faces, . . the ease, the
swiftness, and the thrill of it all; the thrill of yielding to earth
and the beauty of earth, of giving up for a while one's futile
strugglings to reach the moon?"

Honor stood silent, gazing at the picture with rapt interest. To this
deep-hearted passionate woman, whose sympathies stretched upward and
downward along the whole gamut of human feeling, its appeal was far
stronger than Quita--in whom passion was mainly an imaginative
quality--was likely to realise. For the small picture was heavy with
heat and colour, and the glamour of high mid-summer; the sky's blue
intensity glowing between masses of white thunderous cloud; the
hillsides clothed in their August splendour of purple, and pink, and
green: and down the white track that sloped to the valley a man and a
woman, hand in hand, the woman leading, appeared to be coming straight
out of the picture. Her flying hair, and the sweep of her draperies,
showed the speed of their going; and the ecstasy of it shone in the
faces of both.

"It's a powerful little poem,"