would bring him somewhere near the limit of his ordinary walks, and so to the real beginning of this walk, so heaven-sent and utterly unexpected twelve hours ago. He knew the cottage he meant to go to. It had white painted windows that slid sideways, and roses over them, and an old seat in the little front garden to read Shakespeare on, and, at the bottom of the field, a brown brook for bathing that tumbled into the broad river just near where the stepping stones led to the old Abbey. He remembered also lovely hot tea, and fried ham half an inch thick, and home-made jam and pastry that melted in your mouth.

He sprang up, his eyes sparkling, buried the débris of his breakfast under the heather, shouldered his knapsack again, and pushed blithely

on.

Midday found him dropping down steep jolting sheep tracks to a town with baths and wells and hydropathic establishments. It was а clean town, but, nevertheless, a town; but it was the last one he would see. A couple of miles out of it and he need not even tread a road. There was a path that mounted up a plantation, up and up and up, till the plantation lay below, and above was a world of jagged silvery limestone and silky bents, with thyme and potentilla and wild pansies set like jewels in it. Limestone walls, their tops all broken where the mountain sheep had jumped over them, straggled across this world, and farther on, not more than an hour or two, lay his destination. He was very proud of the dust that lay thick and white on his black boots and black stockings. His knapsack felt only a little heavy, and as he put the miles behind him he changed its position only a little more frequently. The blissful thought that he should be here-here- carried him on. VOL, 17-NO, 847

What a lot money could do if only you possessed it in sufficiently large quantities! It never occurred to him to wish that the ten shillings had been more. More could not have purchased more. He did not know, indeed, that it had not purchased and could not purchase this that he already had— his mind's innocence, his maiden health, the openness of his eyes to beauty, of his ears to the music of the world, of his heart to sudden delight. As he slowly climbed the hill, his jacket over one white jerseyed arm and his knapsack dragging on the other, he blessed all the wrong things

measles, his aunt's funereal conferences, the stranger who would occupy his bed that night, the unbroken coin in his belt. The real things passed unnoticed, undreamed of. He had always had them. Should he not continue always to have them?

Of the love that his treasured books talked about he knew nothing except what he had read in them.

He dined like a king, with Richard Coeur-de-Lion and Hotspur, Coleman (Roma), and the President of the Royal Academy for invisible company. The woman who had opened the cottage door to him had looked him up and down and had asked where his friends were, but he had not told her that these were his friends. When he had made her understand what he wanted, she had agreed to house and board him for the sum of three-andsixpence a day. Thereupon, he had made a swift calculation. The day was Tuesday; reckoning from his first meal, he had enough, all but sixpence, to last him for two whole days as well as up to and including tea-time on Friday. That, with the day spent in getting there and a day to get back again, would be five days. For a moment he had felt inclined to bother the slight shortage that would have

made a round week of it; but now a whole chicken lay on the dish before him, with gravy, cauliflower, potatoes, and a great gooseberry pie with a jug of cream on the other side of a cruet as big as a chandelier.

Unskillfully he attacked the chicken with a table-knife, and opened his Shakespeare.

At nine o'clock a candle was brought in to a slight, white-jerseyed figure fast asleep in a horsehair chair. He had been going to look for the pool he would bathe in before breakfast, had only sat down for a moment, and could n't understand why he had fallen asleep. It was with a bent and stumbling walk that he got somehow up the narrow stairs and reached his bedroom. Afterwards he dimly remembered saying his prayers and winding up his watch.

The next morning the mere physical operation of getting out of bed took him nearly five minutes. The truth was that he had walked nearer thirtyfive miles than thirty. But, of course, the stiffness would be all right after his bath. Barefooted (he had tried to get his boots on) he sought the pool. It was part of the ritual of the holiday to bathe, and he did so in a brook that must just have had an iceberg taken out of it. Then, chattering between his teeth that it was glorious, he returned to breakfast and warmth.

After breakfast he glanced across the parlor to where his sketching things lay on a chair. He refused to admit that it would be quite a horrible effort to go across the room for them. He told himself, instead, that it would be better to take a preliminary stroll before committing himself to a subject. That was at half-past eight; but it was nearly ten o'clock before, barefooted and leaning heavily on a stick he had borrowed, he had dropped down the mile of steep hillside and reached the

stepping stones that crossed the river to the Abbey.

He sat down again to knead his thighs and calves and to make careful little pressures on his feet.

M. R. J., together with most other artists, has painted that Abbey; but M. R. J. never painted anything half so lovely as the girl of thirteen who, as Roy sat, presently appeared upon the farther bank, sat down to take off her shoes and stockings, and then began the perilous passage of the stones. Not that Roy saw how lovely she was all at once. At first he saw only her dark hair and long white legs, and, purely as a matter of picture-composition, the stately old Abbey was quite able to hold its own with the approaching figure. But as she drew nearer, her arms outspread for balance, the Abbey began as it were to lose ground. What had been a landscape with a figure in it became a figure with some sort of landscape behind. A few moments later it was not even that. It was a portrait pure and simple, at which Roy could only gaze with parted lips and eyes as big and round as saucers.

The dancing water near the bank cast the light upward, so that all the shadows were turned upside down. A golden mesh of light rippled on her legs and upcaught skirt of blue serge; and the light glowed also under her chin, her brows, the soft 'M' of her upper lip, and into the recesses of the dark hair about her neck. And at the sight of her eyes the quiet old Abbey passed away from Roy's vision altogether. They looked like damsons fallen into a pot-pourri of rose-petals, big as pennies, liquid as the black pool below the stones. As she sprang to the bank he could see - for he had got somehow to his feet a tiny fleck in each of them his own white jersey.

The ripple from the water went; the

Then as he looked her lips parted. Underneath that soft M, like the standard petal of a sweet-pea, the pearls appeared. She was smiling at him.

'Hallo!' she said, as if they had just come together after having been parted for a short time.

'Hallo!' he replied.
'Do you live here?'

But he had only just been able to get out that 'Hallo,' and now had a foolish stammering. Oh, he knew already what he wanted to say that he had only just come to live there, but had lots of money and now was n't going to live anywhere else. He wanted to say that when they were married they would go on living there together, and she would always look like that, and they would live up at his cottage, and have chicken and gooseberry pie for dinner with Geraint and Enid and Coleman (Roma) and the President of the Royal Academy every day. He wanted to tell herfor it had all come upon him in one overwhelming instant-that that was quite true about knights and ladies' sleeves and tourneys and Queens of Love and Beauty. He wanted to read his thumbed old Shakespeare with her, to have those eyes and his own gray ones looking at the same words at the same moment, her glossy curls against his own fair tumbled toppin. Those were just a few of the things he wanted to say.

But 'I'm living up there, for a bit; I only came yesterday; I walked,' he said.

'All by yourself?'
'Yes.'

'How far did you walk?'

'I should think nearly thirty-five miles.'

'O-o-oh! What a lot! That's ever so

'No,' he replied. He sincerely believed it. He forgot that his puffed and pink feet proclaimed that he could not yet get his boots on.

'I saw you looking at your feet. I once walked ten miles, but I was very tired.'

'Were you?' he said. 'Girls are, I suppose.'

It was the first time he had ever supposed anything whatever in the world about girls.

'And I had an awful blister,' she confessed. 'Do your feet hurt you when I touch them like that?' She stooped and put a cool palm on one of them. 'Oh, how hot! The water's made mine as cool as anythingfeel!'

Already behind his bliss was a tremendous contempt for all grown-up people, except Shakespeare and a few others who wrote books. Presumably they knew all about this huge thing that had just happened to him, but yet they found time to hold conferences about other things. He must be mistaken. They could n't know about it. Only he, Shakespeare, and a few others knew about it.

'And shall you walk back again?' she asked. They had sat down, and her cool hand was again on his hot and bruised foot.

'Rather!' he replied.
'What is your name?'
'Roy Vanner.'

'Mine's Mildred. Mildred Lake. We've taken the rectory behind the Abbey there for a month. Father's gone fishing, and mother's busy. Why don't you come and sit on the stepping stones and waggle your feet in the water so they'll be cool?'

He nearly fell in the attempt, but her back was toward him so that it did not matter. They had to cross seven

is it if it falls so very, very far below that first kiss on a mossy steppingstone or that hand-in-hand walk through the beechwoods in June?

And do you remember how you had it, the whole three-days' immortality of it for just ten shillings?

They walked, those two children, your parents-in-love, she with her arm sometimes about him to steady him over the rougher places, past glades of campion and stitchwort and fern, or on the hot slippery bents gemmed with the wild pansies and thyme. They paddled in pools where the moss made soft bolsters for his feet. They tried (but failed) to get near the red deer, and turned up the leaves of the hazels to see how the nuts were ripening. Their teeth were blue with the stain of bilberries, and laughing they compared indigo tongues. They kissed often. He had bound her hair with an old snake skin he had found, and he talked a lot of nonsense, of ladies' sleeves and Queens of Love and Beauty. She had promised never to marry anybody else, and he was going to practise his painting ever so hard and be a Royal Academician. She wore his ring. It was made of a bit of old rabbit-snare with a forget-me-not in it, that he renewed every time they came to a patch of the flowers by brook or marshy patch. Twenty times a day he said, and made her repeat after him, 'I love you.'

'And you will write me letters at my school, won't you?' she asked.

A little scruple popped up that he had tried to keep under. It was not about writing letters to her at her school, but about not writing them to her at her home. They were engaged, of course, but they could not be 'really' engaged without some sort of regard to her home.

'I ought to see your father,' he said with a show of boldness.

'Oh, he might be cross!'

'But it will be years and years before we are married, and he can't be cross all that time.'

'I don't think mother would be quite so cross,' she ventured.

But no. He insisted that it must be her father. This was an affair between man and man.

Between the days spent with her and the nights when he crept into his bed at the cottage up the hill there was, for bliss, very little difference. In some golden state that was neither sleep nor waking, he went over it all again and again, every look of her eyes, every word she had spoken. And then, on the Thursday night, he got into bed remembering that that was the last night he was to sleep there. His ten shillings would give him tea on the morrow, and after that.

A flood of cold misery overwhelmed him.

The place was just within the 'nightingale-line,' and that night a brute of a bird sang.

By morning he had taken a resolution. It was a hardy one, and hurt him afresh somewhere in the breast every time he thought of it, but it could not be escaped. He must see her father about their being 'properly' engaged.

And (as was bound to happen) that morning she did not appear at their trysting-place. Some accident or bidding kept her within doors. He was in an agony. Unless she appeared in the afternoon that meant that he would not see her again to say good-bye to.

He dared not go back to the cottage for dinner for fear of missing her. At three o'clock she had not appeared, at half-past three there was still no sign of her.

And that settled it. Four o'clock found him knocking at the front door of the rectory behind the Abbey_and asking for Mr. Lake.