the larches shot up green spires by the borders of woods and on mounds within, deep ditchbanks unrolled profuse tangles of new blades, and sharp eyes might light on a late white violet overlooked by the children; primroses ran along the banks.  Jane had a maxim that flowers should be spared to live their life, especially flowers of the wilds; she had reared herself on our poets; hence Mrs. Lackstraw’s dread of the arrival of one of the minstrel order:  and the girl, who could deliberately cut a bouquet from the garden, if requested, would refuse to pluck a wildflower.  But now they cried out to her to be plucked in hosts, they claimed the sacrifice, and it seemed to her no violation of her sentiment to gather handfuls making a bunch that would have done honour to the procession of the children’s May-day—­a day she excused for the slaughter because her idol and prophet among the poets, wild nature’s interpreter, was that day on the side of the children.  How like a bath of freshness would the thick faintly-fragrant mass shine to her patient!  Only to look at it was medicine!  She believed, in her lively healthfulness, that the look would give him a spring to health, and she hurried forward to have them in water-the next sacred obligation to the leaving of them untouched.

She had reared herself on our poets.  If much brooding on them will sometimes create a sentimentalism of the sentiment they inspire, that also, after our manner of developing, leads to finer civilisation; and as her very delicate feelings were not always tyrants over her clear and accurate judgement, they rather tended to stamp her character than lead her into foolishness.  Blunt of speech, quick in sensibility, imaginative, yet idealistic, she had the complex character of diverse brain and nerve, and was often a problem to the chief person interested in it.  She thought so decisively, felt so shrinkingly; spoke so flatly, brooded so softly!  Such natures, in the painful effort to reconcile apparent antagonism and read themselves, forget that they are not full grown.  Longer than others are they young:  but meanwhile they are of an age when we are driven abroad to seek and shape our destinies.

Passing through the garden-gate of Lappett’s farm she made her way to the south-western face of the house to beg a bowl of water of the farmer’s wife, and had the sweet surprise of seeing her patient lying under swallows’ eaves on a chair her brother had been commissioned to send from London for coming uses.  He was near the farm-wife’s kitchen, but to windward of the cooking-reek, pleasantly warmed, sufficiently shaded, and alone, with open letter on the rug covering his legs.  He whistled to Jane’s dog Wayland, a retriever, having Newfoundland relationships, of smithy redness and ruggedness; it was the whistle that startled her to turn and see him as she was in the act of handing Mrs. Lappett her primroses.

‘Out?  I feared it would be a week.  Is it quite prudent?’ Jane said, toning down her delight.