a fall in peeping over chasms, for a glimpse of the page; but immediately, and still with a bent head, she turned her face to where the load of virginal blossom, whiter than summer-cloud on the sky, showered and drooped and clustered so thick as to claim colour and seem, like higher Alpine snows in noon-sunlight, a flush of white.  From deep to deeper heavens of white, her eyes perched and soared.  Wonder lived in her.  Happiness in the beauty of the tree pressed to supplant it, and was more mortal and narrower.  Reflection came, contracting her vision and weighing her to earth.  Her reflection was:  “He must be good who loves to be and sleep beneath the branches of this tree!” She would rather have clung to her first impression:  wonder so divine, so unbounded, was like soaring into homes of angel-crowded space, sweeping through folded and on to folded white fountain-bow of wings, in innumerable columns; but the thought of it was no recovery of it; she might as well have striven to be a child.  The sensation of happiness promised to be less short-lived in memory, and would have been had not her present disease of the longing for happiness ravaged every corner of it for the secret of its existence.  The reflection took root.  “He must be good . . . !” That reflection vowed to endure.  Poor by comparison with what it displaced, it presented itself to her as conferring something on him, and she would not have had it absent though it robbed her.

She looked down.  Vernon was dreamily looking up.

She plucked Crossjay hurriedly away, whispering that he had better not wake Mr. Whitford, and then she proposed to reverse their previous chase, and she be the hound and he the hare.  Crossjay fetched a magnificent start.  On his glancing behind he saw Miss Middleton walking listlessly, with a hand at her side.

“There’s a regular girl!” said he in some disgust; for his theory was, that girls always have something the matter with them to spoil a game.

CHAPTER XII

MISS MIDDLETON AND MR. VERNON WHITFORD

Looking upward, not quite awakened out of a transient doze, at a fair head circled in dazzling blossom, one may temporize awhile with common sense, and take it for a vision after the eyes have regained direction of the mind.  Vernon did so until the plastic vision interwound with reality alarmingly.  This is the embrace of a Melusine who will soon have the brain if she is encouraged.  Slight dalliance with her makes the very diminutive seem as big as life.  He jumped to his feet, rattled his throat, planted firmness on his brows and mouth, and attacked the dream-giving earth with tremendous long strides, that his blood might be lively at the throne of understanding.  Miss Middleton and young Crossjay were within hail:  it was her face he had seen, and still the idea of a vision, chased from his reasonable wits, knocked hard and again for readmission.  There was little