visitors to the farm had exceeded the sleeping room, and he
and another little fellow had been provided with a bed in the miller's
house. He had never quite forgotten that bedroom--its huge old-fashioned
four-poster, slumbrous with great dark hangings, such as Queen Elizabeth
seems always to have slept in; its walls dim with tapestry, and its
screen of antique bead-work. But it was round the toilet table that
memory grew brightest, for thereon was a crystal phial of a most
marvellous perfume, and two great mother-of-pearl shells, shedding a
mystical radiance--the most commonplace Rimmel's, without doubt, and the
shells 'dreadful,' one may be sure. But to him, as he took a reverent
breath of that phial, it seemed the very sweetbriar fragrance of her
gown that caught his sense; and, surely, he never in all the world found
scent like that again. Thus, long after, she would come to him in
day-dreams, wafted on its strange sweetness, and clothed about with that
mystical lustre of pearl.

There were five years between him and that memory as he stepped into
that enchanted land for the second time. The sweet figure of young
womanhood to which he had turned his boyish soul in hopeless worship,
when it should have been busied rather with birds' nests and
rabbit-snares, had, it is true, come to him in dimmer outline each
Spring, but with magic the deeper for that. As the form faded from the
silver halo, and passed more and more into mythology, it seemed, indeed,
as if she had never lived for him at all, save in dreams, or on another
star. Still, his memory held by those great shells, and he had come at
last to the fabled country on the perilous quest--who of us dare venture
such a one to-day?--of a 'lost saint.' Enquiry of his friends that
evening, cautious as of one on some half-suspected diplomacy, told him
that one with the name of his remembrance did live at the
mill-house--with an old father, too. But how all the beauty of the
singing morning became a scentless flower when, on making the earliest
possible call, he was met at the door with that hollow word, 'Away'--a
word that seemed to echo through long rooms of infinite emptiness and
turn the daylight shabby--till the addendum, 'for the day,' set the
birds singing again, and called the sunshine back.

A few nights after he was sitting at her side, by a half-opened window,
with his arm about her waist, and her head thrillingly near his. With
his pretty gift of recitation he