e forefront of society. No doubt
the conventionalities of a man like Forgue must have been sometimes
shocked in familiar intercourse with one like Eppy; but while he was
merely flirting with her, the very things that shocked would also amuse
him--for I need hardly say he was not genuinely refined; and by and by
the growing passion obscured them. There is no doubt that, had she been
confronted as his wife with the common people of society, he would have
become aware of many things as vulgarities which were only
simplicities; but in the meantime she was no more vulgar to him than a
lamb or a baby is vulgar, however unfit either for a Belgravian
drawing-room. Vulgar, at the same time, he would have thought and felt
her, but for the love that made him do her justice. Love is the opener
as well as closer of eyes. But men who, having seen, become blind
again, think they have had their eyes finally opened.

For some time there was no change in Eppy's behaviour but that she was
not tearful as before. She continued diligent, never grumbled at the
hardest work, and seemed desirous of making up for remissness in the
past, when in truth she was trying to make up for something else in the
present: she would atone for what she would not tell, by doing
immediate duty with the greater devotion. But by and by she began
occasionally to show, both in manner and countenance, a little of the
old pertness, mingled with uneasiness. The phenomenon, however, was so
intermittent and unpronounced, as to be manifest only to eyes familiar
with her looks and ways: to Donal it was clear that the relation
between her and Forgue was resumed. Yet she never went out in the
evening except sent by her grandmother, and then she always came home
even with haste--anxious, it might have seemed, to avoid suspicion.

It was the custom with Donal and Davie to go often into the fields and
woods in the fine weather--they called this their observation class--to
learn what they might of the multitudinous goings on in this or that of
Nature's workshops: there each for himself and the other exercised his
individual powers of seeing and noting and putting together. Donal knew
little of woodland matters, having been chiefly accustomed to meadows
and bare hill-sides; yet in the woods he was the keener of the two to
observe, and could the better teach that he was but a better learner.

One day, as they were walking together under the thin shade of a
fir-thicket, Davie sa