p of landscape, with the windlass of
the well and the bucket overgrown with mosses and brimming with water
crystal clear, and there were flowering plants in the window, with
leaves and blossoms all translucent against the outer dazzle. The
whole family was gathered there: Uncle Dan, with his six feet of yeoman
manhood, bald and rufous-gray; Aunt Deborah, with her child's figure and
the kind old face framed in the ringlets of her younger days; the girls
and the boys, a houseful of them, ranging in years from six-and-twenty
to four or five, and every face was puckered with laughter, and every
hand and voice applauded. In their midst was a stranger to Paul, a
girl of eighteen, who marched up and down the room with a half-flowered
foxglove in her hand. She carried it like a sabre at the slope, and her
step was a burlesque of the cavalry stride. She issued military orders
to an imaginary contingent of troops, and her contralto voice rang like
a bell. Her upper lip was corked in two dainty black lines of moustache,
and on her tumbled and untidy curls she had perched a shallow chip
strawberry-pottle, which sat like a forage-cap.

'Carry--so! she sang out; and at that instant, discerning a stranger,
she turned, with bent shoulders and a swift rustle of skirts, and
skimmed into the back garden.

'Oh, you silly!' cried one of the girls; 'it's only Paul.'

She came back, and as she passed the old moss-grown bucket she bent to
it and scooped up a palmiul of water, and washed away the moustache of
burnt cork; then, with a coquettish lingering in her walk, she came in,
patting her lips with her apron, her roguish head still decorated with
the strawberry-pottle. Her eyes sparkled with an innocent baby devilry,
but the rest of her face was as demure as a Quakeress's bonnet Her hair
was of an extraordinary fineness and plenty, and as wayward as it was
fine, so that with the shadow of the doorway round her, and the bright
sunlight in every thread of it, it burned like a halo.

'Paul?' she said, pausing in front of him, and looking from a level
right into his eyes, whilst her rosy little hands smoothed her apron.
'Is Paul a cousin, too?'

'Of course he is,' said the girl who had called her back; 'he's our
first cousin, Paul is.'

'Is he,' she asked, with demure face and dancing eye--' is he--in a
kissing relationship?'

'Try him, my wench,' said Paul's uncle.

She bunched her red lips for a kiss, like a child, and advanced her
h