lly," replied Mrs. Farnsworth. "Now go ahead from the beginning
of the scene."

Cautiously drawing back the branches, I espied Alice striking a pose on
a mammoth rock. She bent forward, clasping her knees, and with an
occasional glance at what appeared to be an open book beside her, she
began:

"You ask me who I am, my lord? It matters not at all who or what I am;
let it suffice that berries are my food and the brook that sings behind
me gives me drink. To be one thing or another is a weariness. Would you
ask yonder oak for a name, or trouble the wind with like foolish
questions? No; it is enough that a tree is strong and fine to look upon
and that a wind has healing in its wings."

With her head to one side and an arresting gesture, and throwing into
her voice all its charm and a new compelling innocence and sweetness,
she continued:

"But you would have a name? Then, O foolish one, so much I will tell
you: Yesterday I was Helen, who launched a thousand ships and shook the
topless towers of Ilium. To-day I am Rosalind in the forest of Arden,
and to-morrow I may be Antigone, or Ariel or Viola, or what you will. I
am what I make myself or choose to be. I pray you, let that suffice."

My face was wet with perspiration, and my heart thumped wildly. For
either I was stark, staring mad, or these were lines from Searles's
"Lady Larkspur," the manuscript of which was carefully locked in my
trunk.

"That should be spoken a trifle more slowly, and with the best air of
unpremeditatedness you can put into it," Mrs. Farnsworth was saying.
"You can work it out better when you've memorized the lines. It's
immensely effective having the last scene come back to the big boulder
on the mountainside. Let me look at that a minute."

She took up the manuscript--there was no question of the blue cover of
my copy of "Lady Larkspur"--and turned to the passage she sought.

"Let me read this over," Mrs. Farnsworth continued: "'I have played, my
lord, at hide-and-seek with the stars, and I have run races with the
brooks. You alone of all that have sought me are equally fleet of foot
and heart! If you but touch my hand, I am lost forever. And this hand--I
beg you look at it--is as brown as a berry and as rough as hickory bark.
A wild little hand and not lightly to be yielded at any man's behest.
Look at me carefully, my lord.' She rises to full height quickly. Let me
see you do that, Alice."

Alice's golden head became more distinctivel