“You dear kind Euphra!” said Harry, going round to her side and taking her hand.  He did not stay long with her, however, nor did Euphra seem particularly to want him.

“There was one thing I ought to have mentioned to you the other night, Mr. Sutherland; and I daresay I should have mentioned it, had not Mr. Arnold interrupted our tete-a-tete.  I feel now as if I had been guilty of claiming far more than I have a right to, on the score of musical insight.  I have Scotch blood in me, and was indeed born in Scotland, though I left it before I was a year old.  My mother, Mr. Arnold’s sister, married a gentleman who was half Sootch; and I was born while they were on a visit to his relatives, the Camerons of Lochnie.  His mother, my grandmother, was a Bohemian lady, a countess with sixteen quarterings—­not a gipsy, I beg to say.”

Hugh thought she might have been, to judge from present appearances.

But how was he to account for this torrent of genealogical information, into which the ice of her late constraint had suddenly thawed?  It was odd that she should all at once volunteer so much about herself.  Perhaps she had made up one of those minds which need making up, every now and then, like a monthly magazine; and now was prepared to publish it.  Hugh responded with a question: 

“Do I know your name, then, at last?  You are Miss Cameron?”

“Euphrasia Cameron; at your service, sir.”  And she dropped a gay little courtesy to Hugh, looking up at him with a flash of her black diamonds.

“Then you must sing to me to-night.”

“With all the pleasure in gipsy-land,” replied she, with a second courtesy, lower than the first; taking for granted, no doubt, his silent judgment on her person and complexion.

By this time they had reached the woods in a different quarter from that which Hugh had gone through the other day with Harry.  And here, in very deed, the Spring met them, with a profusion of richness to which Hugh was quite a stranger.  The ground was carpeted with primroses, and anemones, and other spring flowers, which are the loveliest of all flowers.  They were drinking the sunlight, which fell upon them through the budded boughs.  By the time the light should be hidden from them by the leaves, which are the clouds of the lower firmament of the woods, their need of it would be gone:  exquisites in living, they cared only for the delicate morning of the year.

“Do look at this darling, Mr. Sutherland!” exclaimed Euphrasia suddenly, as she bent at the root of a great beech, where grew a large bush of rough leaves, with one tiny but perfectly-formed primrose peeping out between.  “Is it not a little pet?—­all eyes—­all one eye staring out of its curtained bed to see what ever is going on in the world.—­You had better lie down again:  it is not a nice place.”

She spoke to it as if it had been a kitten or a baby.  And as she spoke, she pulled the leaves yet closer over the little starer so as to hide it quite.