“Val, unhappy?  You fanciful child, this is worse than Tom Wallis!  What should make Val unhappy?  He might be dull,” said Laura ruefully.  “Life at Wanhope isn’t exciting!  But he’s keen on his work and very fond of the country.  Val is one of the most contented people I know.”

A shadow fell over Isabel’s face, the veil that one draws down when one has offered a confidence to hands that are not ready to receive it.  “Then it must be all my imagination.”  She abandoned the subject as rapidly as she had introduced it.  “O! dear, I am sleepy.”  She stretched herself and yawned, opening her mouth wide and shutting it with a little snap like a kitten.  “I was up at six to give Val his breakfast, and I’ve been running about all day, what with the school treat next week, and Jimmy’s new night-shirts that I had to get the stuff for and cut them out, and choir practice, and Fanny taking it into her head to make rhubarb jam.  How can London people stay up till twelve or one o’clock every night?  But of course they don’t get up at six.”

“Have a snooze in my hammock,” suggested Laura.  “I see Barry coming, which means that Bernard is going off and I shall have to run away and leave you, and probably the men won’t come out for some time.  Take forty winks, you poor child, it will freshen you up.”

“I never, never go to sleep in the daytime,” said Isabel firmly.  “It’s a demoralizing habit.  But I shouldn’t mind tumbling into your hammock, thank you very much.”  And, while Mrs. Clowes went away with Barry, she slipped across to Laura’s large comfortable cot, swung waist-high between two alders that knelt on the river brink.

Isabel sprawled luxuriously at full length, one arm under her head and the other dropped over the netting:  her young frame was tired, little flying aches of fatigue were darting pins and needles through her knees and shoulders and the base of her spine.  The evening was very warm and the stars winked at her, they were green diamonds that sparkled through chinks in the alder leafage overhead:  round dark leaves like coins, and scattered in clusters, like branches of black bloom.  Near at hand the river ran in silken blackness, but below the coppice, where it widened into shallows, it went whispering and rippling over a pebbly bottom on its way to the humming thunder of the mill.  And in a fir-tree not far off a nightingale was singing, now a string of pearls dropping bead by bead from his throat, now rich turns and grace-notes, and now again a reiterated metallic chink which melted into liquid fluting: 

Vogek im Tannenwald
Pfeifet so hell: 
Pfeifet de Wald aus und ein,
wo wird mein Schatze sein? 
Vogele im Tannenwald pfeifet so hell.