that we recognise it not. We
cannot believe that the baby intruder is in reality the king of our
fortunes; the ruler of our lives. But so it is continually; and since
IT IS, it must be right.

We finished the morning by reading Shakspeare--Romeo and Juliet--at
which the old folio seemed naturally to open. There is a time--a sweet
time, too, though it does not last--when to every young mind the play
of plays, the poem of poems, is Romeo and Juliet. We were at that
phase now.

John read it all through to me--not for the first time either; and
then, thinking I had fallen asleep, he sat with the book on his knee,
gazing out of the open window.

It was a warm summer day--breathless, soundless--a day for quietness
and dreams. Sometimes a bee came buzzing among the roses, in and away
again, like a happy thought. Nothing else was stirring; not a single
bird was to be seen or heard, except that now and then came a coo of
the wood-pigeons among the beech-trees--a low, tender voice--reminding
one of a mother's crooning over a cradled child; or of two true lovers
standing clasped heart to heart, in the first embrace, which finds not,
and needs not, a single word.

John sat listening. What was he thinking about? Why that strange
quiver about his mouth?--why that wonderful new glow, that infinite
depth of softness in his eyes?

I closed mine. He never knew I saw him. He thought I slept placidly
through that half-hour; which seemed to him as brief as a minute. To
me it was long--ah, so long! as I lay pondering with an intensity that
was actual pain, on what must come some time, and, for all I knew,
might even now be coming.

CHAPTER XI

A week slipped by. We had grown familiar with Enderley Hill--at least
I had. As for John, he had little enough enjoyment of the pretty spot
he had taken such a fancy to, being absent five days out of the seven;
riding away when the morning sun had slid down to the boles of my four
poplars, and never coming home till Venus peeped out over their heads
at night. It was hard for him; but he bore the disappointment well.

With me one day went by just like another. In the mornings I crept
out, climbed the hill behind Rose Cottage garden, and there lay a
little under the verge of the Flat, in a sunny shelter, watching the
ants running in and out of the numerous ant-hills there; or else I
turned my observation to the short velvet herbage that grew everywhere
hereabouts; for the co