Meanwhile, Harry did not waste his precious opportunity.  He had this advantage, that when he saw Bessie he saw only the fair face that he worshipped, and thought nothing of her adventitious belongings, while in her absence he saw her surrounded by them, and himself set at a vast conventional distance.  He said that the four years since she left Beechhurst seemed but as one day, now they were together again in the old familiar places, and she replied that she was glad he thought so, for she thought so too.  “I still call the Forest home, though I do not pine in exile.  I return to it the day after to-morrow,” she told him.

“Good little philosophical Bessie!” cried Harry, and relapsed into his normal state of masculine superiority.

Then they talked of themselves, past, present, and future—­now with animation, now again with dropped and saddened voices.  The afternoon sun twinkled in the many-paned lattices of the old house in the background, and the brook sang on as it had sung from immemorial days before a stone of the house was built.  Harry gazed rather mournfully at the ivied walls during one of their sudden silences, and then he told Bessie that the proprietor was ill, and the manor would have a new owner by and by.

“I trust he will not want to turn out my father and mother and pull it down, but he is an improving landlord, and has built some excellent ugly farmsteads on his other property.  I have a clinging to it, and the doctor says it would be well for me had I been born and bred in almost any other place.”

Bessie sighed, and said deprecatingly, “Harry, you look as strong as a castle.  If it was Mr. Christie they were always warning, I should not wonder, but you!”

“But me!  Little Christie looks as though a good puff of wind might blow him away, and he is as tough as a pin-wire.  I stand like a tower, and they tell me the foundations are sinking.  It sounds like a fable to frighten me.”

“Harry dear, it is not serious; don’t believe it.  Everybody has to take a little care.  You must give up London and hard study if they try you.  We will all help you to bear the disappointment:  I know it would be cruel, but if you must, you must!  Leaning towers, I’ve heard, stand hundreds of years, and serve their purpose as well as towers that stand erect.”

“Ah, Bessie, cunning little comforter!  Tell me which is the worse—­a life that is a failure or death?” said Harry, watching the gyrations of a straw that the eddies of the rivulet were whirling by.

“Oh, death, death—­there is no remedy for death.”  Bessie shuddered.  There was repulsion in her face as well as awe.

Harry felt surprised:  this was his own feeling, but women, he thought, had more natural resignation.  Not so, however, his young comrade.  She loved life, and hoped to see good days.  He reminded her that she had lost both her parents early.

“Yes,” she said, “but my other father and mother prevented me suffering from their loss.  I scarcely recollect it, I was such a happy child.  It would be different now if any of those, young like myself, that I have grown up with and love very much, were to pass out of sight, and I had to think that nowhere in the world could I find them any more.”