Mrs. Laudersdale looked askance at her companion, then turned and met his gaze.  Slowly her lashes fell, the earth seemed to fail beneath her feet, the light to swoon from her eyes, her lips shook, and a full flush swept branding and burning up throat and face, stinging her very forehead, and shooting down her fingertips.  In an instant it had faded, and she shone the pallid, splendid thing she was before.  In that instant, for the first time this summer, she comprehended that her husband’s existence imported anything to her.  Behind the maple-tree, the wood began again; without a syllable, she stepped aside, suffered him to pass, and hastened to bury herself in its recesses.

What lover ever accounted for his mistress’s caprices?  Mr. Raleigh proceeded on his walk alone.  And what was her husband to him?  He did not know that such a man existed.  For him there had been no deadly allurement in the fervid scene; it had stretched a land of promise veiled in its azure ardors, with intimations of rapture and certainty of rest.  Now, as he wandered on and turned down another lane to the woods, the tints grew deeper; his eyes, bent inward, saw all the world in the color of his thought; he would have affirmed that the bare brown banks were lined in deep-toned indigo flower-bells whose fragrance rose visible above them or curled from stem to stem, and that the hollows in which the path hid itself at last were of the same soft gloom.  But, finally, when not far distant from the Bawn again, he shook off his reverie and struck another path that he might avoid rencontre.  Perhaps the very sound that awoke him was the one he wished to shun; at the next step it became more distinct,—­a child’s voice singing some tuneless song; and directly a tiny apparition appeared before him, as if it had taken shape, with its wide, light eyes and corn-silk hair, from the most wan and watery of sunbeams.  But what had a child to do in this paradise, thought he, and from whence did it come?  Impossible to imagine.  Her garments, of rich material, hung freshly torn, it may be, but in shreds; her skin, if that of some fair and delicate nursling, was stained with berries and smeared with soil; she seemed to have no destination; and after surveying him a moment, she mounted a fallen tree, and, bending and swinging forward over a bough, still surveyed him.

“Ah, ha!” said Mr. Roger Raleigh; “what have we here?”

The child still looked in his face, but vouchsafed, in her swinging, no reply.

“What is the little lady’s name?” he asked then.

This query, apparently more comprehensible, elicited a response.  She informed him that her name was “Dymom, Pink, and Beauty.”

“Indeed!  And anything else?”

“Rose Pose,” she added, as if soliciting the aid of memory by lifting her hands near her temples.

“Is that all?”

“Little silly Daffodilly.”

“No more?”

“Rite.”