He sang to ‘Mary of Ellingmere’ and another maid of some place, and a loud song of Britons.

It was startling to me to wake up to twilight in the open air and silence, for I was unaware that I had fallen asleep.  The girl had roused me, and we crept down from the cart.  Horse and farmer were quite motionless in a green hollow beside the roadway.  Looking across fields and fir plantations, I beheld a house in the strange light of the hour, and my heart began beating; but I was overcome with shyness, and said to myself, ‘No, no, that’s not Riversley; I’m sure it isn’t’; though the certainty of it was, in my teeth, refuting me.  I ran down the fields to the park and the bright little river, and gazed.  When I could say, ’Yes, it is Riversley!’ I turned away, hurt even to a sense of smarting pain, without knowing the cause.  I dare say it is true, as the girl declared subsequently, that I behaved like one in a fit.  I dropped, and I may have rolled my body and cried.  An indefinite resentment at Riversley was the feeling I grew conscious of after very fast walking.  I would not have accepted breakfast there.

About mid-day, crossing a stubble-field, the girl met a couple of her people-men.  Near evening we entered one of their tents.  The women set up a cry, ‘Kiomi!  Kiomi!’ like a rising rookery.  Their eyes and teeth made such a flashing as when you dabble a hand in a dark waterpool.  The strange tongue they talked, with a kind of peck of the voice at a word, rapid, never high or low, and then a slide of similar tones all round,—­not musical, but catching and incessant,—­gave me an idea that I had fallen upon a society of birds, exceedingly curious ones.  They welcomed me kindly, each of them looking me in the face a bright second or so.  I had two helps from a splendid pot of broth that hung over a fire in the middle of the tent.

Kiomi was my companion’s name.  She had sisters Adeline and Eveleen, and brothers Osric and William, and she had a cousin a prizefighter.  ’That’s what I’ll be,’ said I. Fiddling for money was not a prospect that charmed me, though it was pleasant lying in Kiomi’s arms to hear Osric play us off to sleep; it was like floating down one of a number of visible rivers; I could see them converging and breaking away while I floated smoothly, and a wonderful fair country nodded drowsy.  From that to cock-crow at a stride.  Sleep was no more than the passage through the arch of a canal.  Kiomi and I were on the heath before sunrise, jumping gravel-pits, chasing sandpipers, mimicking pewits; it seemed to me I had only just heard the last of Osric’s fiddle when yellow colour filled in along the sky over Riversley.  The curious dark thrill of the fiddle in the tent by night seemed close up behind the sun, and my quiet fancies as I lay dropping to sleep, followed me like unobtrusive shadows during daylight, or, to speak truthfully, till about dinner-time, when I thought of nothing but the great stew-pot.