d there, like a ghost of the preceding night,
caught against his will and embraced by the joyous morning. Just then he
had a vision.

A girl came towards him across the grass and stood a few paces distant.
The slender willow twigs, with their hanging catkins and tiny golden
leaves, made a sort of veil between them. She was very beautiful, at
least so the schoolmaster thought; perhaps she was the personification
of the morning, perhaps she was a wood-nymph--it did not matter much; he
felt, in his excitement and exhaustion, that her beauty and grace were
not real, but only an hallucination of moving sun and shade. She took
the swaying willow-twigs in her pretty hands and looked through them at
him and stroked the downy flowers.

'Why did you send me that letter?' she said at last, with a touch of
severity in her voice.

'The letter,' he stammered, wondering what she could mean.

He remembered, with a sort of dull return of consciousness, that he
_was_ guilty of having sent a letter--terribly guilty in his own
estimation--but it was sent to Miss Blakely, and this was not Miss
Blakely. That one letter had so completely absorbed all his mind that he
had quite forgotten any others that he might have written in the course
of his whole life.

'Do not be angry with me,' he said imploringly. He had but one idea,
that was, to keep this radiant dream of beauty with him as long as
possible.

'I'm not angry; I am not angry at all--indeed'--and here she looked down
at the twigs in her hand and began pulling the young leaves rather
roughly--'I am not sure but that I am rather pleased. I have so often
met you in the woods, you know; only I didn't know that you had ever
noticed me.'

'I never did,' said the schoolmaster; but happily his nervous lips gave
but indistinct utterance to the words, and his tone was pathetic. She
thought he had only made some further pleading.

'I--I--I like you very much,' she said. 'I suppose, of course, everybody
will be very much surprised, and mother may not be pleased, you know,
just at first; but she's good and dear, mother is, in spite of what she
says; and father will be glad about anything that pleases me.'

He did not understand what she said; but he felt distressed at the
moment to notice that she was twisting the tender willow leaves, albeit
he saw that she only did so because, in her embarrassment, her fingers
worked unconsciously. He came forward and took her hands gently, to
disentan