“It’s true,” he said; and his own gravity then touched him to join a duet with her, which made them no longer feel strangers, and did the work of a month of intimacy.  Better than sentiment, laughter opens the breast to love; opens the whole breast to his full quiver, instead of a corner here and there for a solitary arrow.  Hail the occasion propitious, O British young! and laugh and treat love as an honest God, and dabble not with the sentimental rouge.  These two laughed, and the souls of each cried out to other, “It is I it is I.”

They laughed and forgot the cause of their laughter, and the sun dried his light river clothing, and they strolled toward the blackbird’s copse, and stood near a stile in sight of the foam of the weir and the many-coloured rings of eddies streaming forth from it.

Richard’s boat, meanwhile, had contrived to shoot the weir, and was swinging, bottom upward, broadside with the current down the rapid backwater.

“Will you let it go?” said the damsel, eying it curiously.

“It can’t be stopped,” he replied, and could have added:  “What do I care for it now!”

His old life was whirled away with it, dead, drowned.  His new life was with her, alive, divine.

She flapped low the brim of her hat.  “You must really not come any farther,” she softly said.

“And will you go, and not tell me who you are?” he asked, growing bold as the fears of losing her came across him.  “And will you not tell me before you go”—­his face burned—­“how you came by that—­that paper?”

She chose to select the easier question for answer:  “You ought to know me; we have been introduced.”  Sweet was her winning off-hand affability.

“Then who, in heaven’s name, are you?  Tell me!  I never could have forgotten you.”

“You have, I think,” she said.

“Impossible that we could ever have met, and I forget you!”

She looked up at him.

“Do you remember Belthorpe?”

“Belthorpe!  Belthorpe!” quoth Richard, as if he had to touch his brain to recollect there was such a place.  “Do you mean old Blaize’s farm?”

“Then I am old Blaize’s niece.”  She tripped him a soft curtsey.

The magnetized youth gazed at her.  By what magic was it that this divine sweet creature could be allied with that old churl!

“Then what—­what is your name?” said his mouth, while his eyes added, “O wonderful creature!  How came you to enrich the earth?”

“Have you forgot the Desboroughs of Dorset, too?” she peered at him from a side-bend of the flapping brim.

“The Desboroughs of Dorset?” A light broke in on him.  “And have you grown to this?  That little girl I saw there!”

He drew close to her to read the nearest features of the vision.  She could no more laugh off the piercing fervour of his eyes.  Her volubility fluttered under his deeply wistful look, and now neither voice was high, and they were mutually constrained.