inquish his command and fall to the rear, where he might
perform the humbler service of occasionally lifting Cicely over
unspannable gulfs of moisture.

Justine, leading the way, guided them across the treacherous surface as
fearlessly as a king-fisher, lighting instinctively on every
grass-tussock and submerged tree-stump of the uncertain path. Now and
then she paused, her feet drawn close on their narrow perch, and her
slender body swaying over as she reached down for some rare growth
detected among the withered reeds and grasses; then she would right
herself again by a backward movement as natural as the upward spring of
a branch--so free and flexible in all her motions that she seemed akin
to the swaying reeds and curving brambles which caught at her as she
passed.

At length the explorers reached the mossy corner where the orchids grew,
and Cicely, securely balanced on a fallen tree-trunk, was allowed to dig
the coveted roots. When they had been packed away, it was felt that this
culminating moment must be celebrated with immediate libations of jam
and milk; and having climbed to a dry slope among the pepper-bushes, the
party fell on the contents of the lunch-basket. It was just the hour
when Bessy's maid was carrying her breakfast-tray, with its delicate
service of old silver and porcelain, into the darkened bed-room at
Lynbrook; but early rising and hard scrambling had whetted the appetites
of the naturalists, and the nursery fare which Cicely spread before
them seemed a sumptuous reward for their toil.

"I do like this kind of picnic much better than the ones where mother
takes all the footmen, and the mayonnaise has to be scraped off things
before I can eat them," Cicely declared, lifting her foaming mouth from
a beaker of milk.

Amherst, lighting his pipe, stretched himself contentedly among the
pepper-bushes, steeped in that unreflecting peace which is shed into
some hearts by communion with trees and sky. He too was glad to get away
from the footmen and the mayonnaise, and he imagined that his
stepdaughter's exclamation summed up all the reasons for his happiness.
The boyish wood-craft which he had cultivated in order to encourage the
same taste in his factory lads came to life in this sudden return to
nature, and he redeemed his clumsiness in crossing the swamp by spying a
marsh-wren's nest that had escaped Justine, and detecting in a
swiftly-flitting olive-brown bird a belated tanager in autumn incogni