f
his pointing finger to where a cluster of grass as fine, but
untransmuted, stood in shadow.

"Oh, but that hasn't the sun on it!" she exclaimed naively. The next
moment she had seen the absurdity of her own speech, and, pivoting to
the path beside him, joined in his laughter.

"Well, it seemed sense to me when I said it," she protested.

"So it would have been if you could have picked the sun too."

"But I suppose it was only the sun that made me want them at all.
Aren't I a goose? Vassie would say I shall never get sense."

"I like that sort of nonsense; it's rather jolly, somehow. I say,
Phoebe, I shall think of you as the girl who wanted to pick the sun.
Doesn't it sound ripping?"

"Oh, my feet are so wet!" cried Phoebe. "I must hurry home. Mother
will fuss so over me, you can't think."

"Shall I just get you that sunny grass before we go?"

Phoebe hesitated, and then some instinct, finer than her comprehension
of it, prompted her to a refusal, and the cotton-grass was left to swing
its gossamer globes of light till the sun should have dipped below the
rim of the moor.

When Ishmael had delivered Phoebe up to the tender agitations of the
fussy, weakly mother, and himself got away from the too-enthusiastic
welcome of the father, he struck towards the cliffs and the Vicarage
with a younger heart than had been his all the evening. Quite naturally
life had slipped through from a film of darkness on to a brighter plane,
and he greeted Boase with none of the gruffness that would have weighed
on him earlier. This also had the result of breaking the reticence which
would otherwise have kept him from telling anything of his real
feelings. Now that his family and the life before him no longer seemed
rayless, he could speak of the blight that had, for him, settled even
over the future as he sat in that fearsome parlour.

Boase listened, glad that the boy seemed to be growing more articulate;
it would make his help, when it was needed, easier to give. He kept
Ishmael for supper, feeling that consideration for Annie was not the
most important thing just then, and after it he walked with the boy as
far as the stile that gave on to the cliff path. Ishmael was far from
having given way to one of his old unbalanced fits of chattering, but it
had been a pleasure to him to talk freely to the person with whom he was
most intimate. It was long--unnaturally long for expansive youth--since
he had talked so freely, for Killigr