d it too well ever to be
the thing in actuality."

"I remember that too. _Dhe!_ how the whole thing comes back! I wonder--"

"Well!" she pressed.

"I wonder if we walked in the Duke's garden again, if we could restore
the very feelings of that time--the innocence and ignorance of it?"

"I don't know that I want to do so," said she, laughing.

"Might we not----" He paused, afraid of his own temerity.

"Try it, you were going to say," she continued.

"You see I have little of your own gift. I'm willing. I am going to the
town, and we might as well go through the grounds as not."

Something in his manner attracted her; even his simple deference, though
she was saying "John Hielan'man, John Hielan'man!" to herself most of
the time and amused if not contemptuous. He was but a farmer--little
more, indeed, than a shepherd, yet something in his air and all his
speech showed him superior to his circumstances. He was a god-send to
her dreariness in this place Edinburgh and the noisy world had made her
fretful of, and she was in the mood for escapade.

They walked into the policies, that were no way changed. Still the
flowers grew thick on the dykes; the tall trees swayed their boughs:
still the same, and yet for Gilian there was, in that faint tinge of
yellow in the leaves, some sorrow he had not guessed in the day they
were trying to recall.

"It is all just as it was," said she. "All just as it was; there are the
very flowers I plucked," and she bent and plucked them again.

"We can never pluck our flowers twice," said he. "The flowers you
gathered then are ghosts."

"Not a bit," said she. "Here they are re-born," and she went as before
from bush to bush and bank to bank, humming a strain of sailor song.

They went under the trees on which he had fancied his heron's nest, and
they looked at each other, laughing.

"Wasn't I a young fool?" he asked. "I was full of dream and conceit in
those days."

"And now?" she asked, burying her face in the flowers and eyeing him
wonderingly.

"Oh, now," said he, "I have lost every illusion." "Or changed them
for others, perhaps." He started at the suggestion. "I suppose you are
right, after all," he said. "I'm still in a measure the child of fancy.
This countryside moves me--I could tenant it with a thousand tales;
never a wood or thicket in it but is full of song. I love it all, and
yet it is my torture. When I was a child the Paymaster once got me on
the bridge crying my