The other’s brow and lip changed, but she stood silent.

“They don’t act like farmer’s sons, do they?  I never should have guessed it if I had seen them anywhere else.  Look, Lizzie, —­ now isn’t he handsome?  I never saw such eyes.”

Elizabeth did not look, but she spoke, and the words lacked no point that lips could give them.

“I am thankful, Rose, that my head does not run upon the things that yours does!”

“What does yours run upon then?” said Rose pouting.  “The other one, I suppose.  That’s the one you were helping with your strawberries just now.  I dont think it is the wisest thing Mr. Haye has ever done, to send you and me here; —­ it’s a pity there wasn’t somebody to warn him.”

“Rose!” —­ said the other, and her eyes seemed to lighten, one to the other, as she spoke, —­ “you know I don’t like such talk —­ I detest and despise it! —­ it is utterly beneath me.  You may indulge in all the nonsense you please, and descend to what you please; —­ but please to understand, I will not hear it.”

Miss Cadwallader’s eye fairly gave way under the lightning.  Elizabeth’s words were delivered with an intensity that kept them quiet, though with the last degree of clear utterance; and turning, as Rufus came up, she gave him a glare of her dark brown eyes that astonished him, and made off with a quick step to a part of the field where she could pick strawberries at a distance from everybody.  She picked them somehow by instinct; she did not know what she was doing; her face rivalled their red bunches; and she picked with a kind of fury.  That being the only way she had of venting her indignation, she threw it into her basket along with the strawberries.  She hadn’t worked so hard the whole afternoon.  She edged away from the rest towards a wild corner, where amid rocks and bushes the strawberry vines spread rich and rank and the berries were larger and finer than any she had seen.  She was determined to have a fine basketful for Winifred.

But she was unused to such stooping and steady work, and as she cooled down she grew very tired.  She was in a rough grown place and she mounted on a rock and stood up to rest herself and look.

Pretty —­ pretty, it was.  It was almost time to go home, for the sun was out of their strawberry patch and the woody walls were a few shades deeper coloured than they had been; while over the river, on the other side, the steep rocks of the home point sent back a warm glow yet.  The hills beyond them stood in the sun, and in close contrast was the little deep green patch of fore-ground, lit up with the white or the gay dresses of the strawberry pickers.  The sweet river, a bit of it, in the middle of the picture, half in sunshine, half in shade.  It was like a little nest of fairy-land; so laughed the sunshine, so dwelt the shade, in this spot and in that one.  Elizabeth stood fast.  It was bewitching to the eyes.  And while she looked, the shadow of Wut-a-qut-o was creeping over the river, and now ready to take off the warm browns of the rocky point.