She gave an impatient little stamp with her foot, and anon surveyed the old house with affectionate eyes.

“You shall be my rescue!” she said, kissing her hand playfully to the latticed windows,—­“You shall turn me into an old-fashioned lady, fond of making jams and pickles, and preserves and herbal waters!  I’ll put away all the idiotic intrigues and silly fooling of modern society in one of your quaint oaken cupboards, and lock them all up with little bags of lavender to disinfect them!  And I will wait for someone to come and find me out and love me; and if no one ever comes—­” Here she paused, then went on,—­“If no one ever comes, why then—­” and she laughed—­“some man will have lost a good chance of marrying as true a girl as ever lived!—­a girl who could love—­ ah!” And she stretched out her pretty rounded arms to the scented air.  “How she could love if she were loved!”

The young moon here put in a shy appearance by showing a fleck of silver above the highest gable of the Manor.

     “A little diamond peak,
      No bigger than an unobserved star,
      Or tiny point of fairy scimitar;
      Bright signal that she only stooped to tie
      Her silver sandals ere deliciously
      She bowed unto the heavens her timid head,
      Slowly she rose as though she would have fled.”

“There’s no doubt,” said Maryllia, “that this place is romantic!  And romance is what I’ve been searching for all my life, and have never found except in books.  Not so much in modern books as in the books that were written by really poetical and imaginative people sixty or seventy years ago.  Nowadays, the authors that are most praised go in for what they call ’realism’—­and their realism is very UNreal, and very nasty.  For instance, this garden,—­these lovely trees,—­this dear old house—­all these are real—­but much too romantic for a modern writer.  He would rather describe a dusthole and enumerate every potato paring in it!  And here am I—­I’m real enough—­but I’m not a bad woman—­I haven’t got what is euphoniously called ‘a past,’ and I don’t belong to the right-down vicious company of ‘Souls.’  So I should never do for a heroine of latter-day fiction.  I’m afraid I’m abnormal.  It’s dreadful to be abnormal!  One becomes a ‘neurotic,’ like Lombroso, and all the geniuses.  But suppose the world were full of merely normal people,—­people who did nothing but eat and sleep in the most perfectly healthy and regular manner,—­oh, what a bore it would be!  There would be no pictures, no sculpture, no poetry, no music, no anything worth living for.  One must have a few ideas beyond food and clothing!”

The moon, rose higher and shed a shower of silver over the grass, lighting up in strong relief the fair face upturned to it.