When they came to the rosebushes he broke for her a few scarce-opened buds, and himself fastened them in the coils of her hair.  Innocent and glad as she was,—­glad even that he thought her fair,—­she trembled beneath his touch, and knew not why she trembled.  When the rosebuds were in place they went to see the clove pinks, and when they had seen the clove pinks they walked slowly up another alley of box, and across a grass plot to a side door of the house; for he had said that he must show her in what great, lonely rooms he lived.

Audrey measured the height and breadth of the house with her eyes.  “It is a large place for one to live in alone,” she said, and laughed.  “There’s a book at the Widow Constance’s; Barbara once showed it to me.  It is all about a pilgrim; and there’s a picture of a great square house, quite like this, that was a giant’s castle,—­Giant Despair.  Good giant, eat me not!”

Child, woman, spirit of the woodland, she passed before him into a dim, cool room, all littered with books.  “My library,” said Haward, with a wave of his hand.  “But the curtains and pictures are not hung, nor the books in place.  Hast any schooling, little maid?  Canst read?”

Audrey flushed with pride that she could tell him that she was not ignorant; not like Barbara, who could not read the giant’s name in the pilgrim book.

“The crossroads schoolmaster taught me,” she explained.  “He has a scar in each hand, and is a very wicked man, but he knows more than the Commissary himself.  The minister, too, has a cupboard filled with books, and he buys the new ones as the ships bring them in.  When I have time, and Mistress Deborah will not let me go to the woods, I read.  And I remember what I read.  I could”—­

A smile trembled upon her lips, and her eyes grew brighter.  Fired by the desire that he should praise her learning, and in her very innocence bold as a Wortley or a Howe, she began to repeat the lines which he had been reading beneath the cherry-tree:—­

    “‘When from the censer clouds of fragrance roll’”—­

The rhythm of the words, the passion of the thought, the pleased surprise that she thought she read in his face, the gesture of his hand, all spurred her on from line to line, sentence to sentence.  And now she was not herself, but that other woman, and she was giving voice to all her passion, all her woe.  The room became a convent cell; her ragged dress the penitent’s trailing black.  That Audrey, lithe of mind as of body; who in the woods seemed the spirit of the woods, in the garden the spirit of the garden, on the water the spirit of the water,—­that this Audrey, in using the speech of the poet, should embody and become the spirit of that speech was perhaps, considering all things, not so strange.  At any rate, and however her power came about, at that moment, in Fair View house, a great actress was speaking.

    “’Fresh blooming Hope, gay daughter of the skies,
      And Faith’”—­