the expressions of their faces, the words upon their lips, Mark was sure that none of them had any idea what Esther was doing.  He debated now the notion of warning Miriam in veiled language about her sister; but such an idea would strike Miriam as monstrous, as a mad and horrible nightmare.  Mark shivered at the mere fancy of the chill that would come over her and of the disdain in her eyes.  Besides, what right had he on the little he knew to involve Esther with her family?  Superficially he might count himself her younger brother; but if he presumed too far, with what a deadly retort might she not annihilate his claim.  Most certainly he was not entitled to intervene unless he intervened bravely and directly.  Mark shook his head at the prospect of doing that.  He could not imagine anybody’s tackling Esther directly on such a subject.  Seventeen to-day!  He looked out of the window and felt that he was bearing upon his shoulders the whole of that green world outspread before him.

The serene morning ripened to a splendid noontide, and Mark who had intended to celebrate his birthday by enjoying every moment of it had allowed the best of the hours to slip away in a stupor of indecision.  More and more the vision of Esther last night haunted him, and he felt that he could not go and see the Greys as he had intended.  He could not bear the contemplation of the three girls with the weight of Esther on his mind.  He decided to walk over to Little Fairfield and persuade Richard to make a journey of exploration up the Greenrush in a canoe.  He would ask Richard his opinion of Will Starling.  What a foolish notion!  He knew perfectly well Richard’s opinion of the Squire, and to lure him into a restatement of it would be the merest self-indulgence.

“Well, I must go somewhere to-day,” Mark shouted at himself.  He secured a packet of sandwiches from the Rectory cook and set out to walk away his worries.

“Why shouldn’t I go down to Wych Maries?  I needn’t meet that chap.  And if I see him I needn’t speak to him.  He’s always been only too jolly glad to be offensive to me.”

Mark turned aside from the high road by the crooked signpost and took the same path down under the ash-trees as he had taken with Esther for the first time nearly a year ago.  Spring was much more like Spring in these wooded hollows; the noise of bees in the blossom of the elms was murmurous as limes in June.  Mark congratulated himself on the spot in which he had chosen to celebrate this fine birthday, a day robbed from time like the day of a dream.  He ate his lunch by the old mill dam, feeding the roach with crumbs until an elderly pike came up from the deeps and frightened the smaller fish away.  He searched for a bullfinch’s nest; but he did not find one, though he saw several of the birds singing in the snowberry bushes; round and ruddy as October apples they looked.  At last he went to the ruined chapel, where after speculating idly for a little while upon