“You have not returned!” he said, smiling; “you have been with me every moment, Eileen.”

“What a pretty tribute!” she exclaimed; “I am beginning to recognise traces of my training after all.  And it is high time, Captain Selwyn, because I was half convinced that you had escaped to the woods again.  What, if you please, have you been doing in town since I paroled you?  Nothing?  Oh, it’s very likely.  You’re probably too ashamed to tell me.  Now note the difference between us; I have been madly tearing over turf and dune, up hills, down hillocks, along headlands, shores, and shingle; and I had the happiness of being half-frozen in the surf before Nina learned of it and stopped me. . . .  Come; sit over here; because I’m quite crazy to tell you everything as usual—­about how I played marbles with the children—­yes, indeed!—­down on my knees and shooting hard!  Oh, it is divine, that sea-girdled, wind-drenched waste of moor and thicket!—­the strange little stunted forests in the hollows of the miniature hills—­do you remember?  The trees, you know, grow only to the wind-level, then spread out like those grotesque trees in fairy-haunted forests—­so old, so fantastic are these curious patches of woods that I am for ever watching to see something magic moving far in the twilight of the trees! . . .  And one night I went out on the moors; oh, heavenly! celestial!—­under the stretch of stars!  Elf-land in silence, save for the bewitched wind.  And the fairy forests drew me toward their edges, down, down into the hollow, with delicious shivers.

“Once I trembled indeed, for the starlight on the swamp was suddenly splintered into millions of flashes; and my heart leaped in pure fright! . . .  It was only a wild duck whirring headlong into the woodland waters—­but oh, if you had been there to see the weird beauty of its coming—­and the star-splashed blackness!  You must see that with me, some time. . . .  When are you coming to Silverside?  We go back very soon, now. . . .  And I don’t feel at all like permitting you to run wild in town when I’m away and playing hopscotch on the lawn with Drina!”

She lay back in her chair, laughing, her hands linked together behind her head.

“Really, Captain Selwyn, I confess I missed you.  It’s much better fun when two can see all those things that I saw—­the wild roses just a tangle of slender green-mossed stems, the new grass so intensely green, with a touch of metallic iridescence; the cat’s-paws chasing each other across the purple inland ponds—­and that cheeky red fox that came trotting out of the briers near Wonder Head, and, when he saw me, coolly attempted to stare me out of countenance!  Oh, it’s all very well to tell you about it, but there is a little something lacking in unshared pleasures. . . .  Yes, a great deal lacking. . . .  And here is our tea-tray at last.”

Nina came up to join them.  Her brother winced as she smiled triumphantly at him, and the colour continued vivid in his face while she remained in the room.  Then the children charged upstairs, fresh from the Park, clamouring for food; and they fell upon Selwyn’s neck, and disarranged his scarf-pin, and begged for buttered toast and crumpets, and got what they demanded before Nina’s authority could prevent.