“Oh, but that hasn’t the sun on it!” she exclaimed naively.  The next moment she had seen the absurdity of her own speech, and, pivoting to the path beside him, joined in his laughter.

“Well, it seemed sense to me when I said it,” she protested.

“So it would have been if you could have picked the sun too.”

“But I suppose it was only the sun that made me want them at all.  Aren’t I a goose?  Vassie would say I shall never get sense.”

“I like that sort of nonsense; it’s rather jolly, somehow.  I say, Phoebe, I shall think of you as the girl who wanted to pick the sun.  Doesn’t it sound ripping?”

“Oh, my feet are so wet!” cried Phoebe.  “I must hurry home.  Mother will fuss so over me, you can’t think.”

“Shall I just get you that sunny grass before we go?”

Phoebe hesitated, and then some instinct, finer than her comprehension of it, prompted her to a refusal, and the cotton-grass was left to swing its gossamer globes of light till the sun should have dipped below the rim of the moor.

When Ishmael had delivered Phoebe up to the tender agitations of the fussy, weakly mother, and himself got away from the too-enthusiastic welcome of the father, he struck towards the cliffs and the Vicarage with a younger heart than had been his all the evening.  Quite naturally life had slipped through from a film of darkness on to a brighter plane, and he greeted Boase with none of the gruffness that would have weighed on him earlier.  This also had the result of breaking the reticence which would otherwise have kept him from telling anything of his real feelings.  Now that his family and the life before him no longer seemed rayless, he could speak of the blight that had, for him, settled even over the future as he sat in that fearsome parlour.

Boase listened, glad that the boy seemed to be growing more articulate; it would make his help, when it was needed, easier to give.  He kept Ishmael for supper, feeling that consideration for Annie was not the most important thing just then, and after it he walked with the boy as far as the stile that gave on to the cliff path.  Ishmael was far from having given way to one of his old unbalanced fits of chattering, but it had been a pleasure to him to talk freely to the person with whom he was most intimate.  It was long—­unnaturally long for expansive youth—­since he had talked so freely, for Killigrew had left St. Renny a year before him to study painting in Paris.  It was the time when the great Barbizon school was in its prime, when Diaz and Rousseau and Harpignies and the rest of that goodly company were heading the return to Nature which the epoch needed, just as later it was to need, with equal sincerity, a return to the primitive in art.  Killigrew was absorbed by the fervour of his new creed and wrote but rarely, and his letters were all but incomprehensible to Ishmael.  Not in his moments of freest intercourse with Phoebe that evening had it been possible to exchange anything beyond the chatter and playfulness of children, but there was that in Ishmael to-night which, he being young, had to find outlet.  For youth is the period of giving, as gathering age is of withholding.