e spell which
the miracle of Frank's youth cast over him. Twenty times a day he found
himself saying to himself suddenly at the end of some ten minutes'
silent resistance to the absurdity of Frank's idea: "But it isn't
possible; it can't be possible," and from the fact of his having to
assure himself so frequently of this, he knew that he was struggling
and arguing with a conclusion which already had taken root in his mind.
For in any case a visible living miracle confronted him, since it was
equally impossible that this youth, this boy, trembling on the verge of
manhood, was thirty-five. Yet such was the fact.

July was ushered in by a couple of days of blustering and fretful rain,
and Darcy, unwilling to risk a chill, kept to the house. But to Frank
this weeping change of weather seemed to have no bearing on the
behaviour of man, and he spent his days exactly as he did under the
suns of June, lying in his hammock, stretched on the dripping grass, or
making huge rambling excursions into the forest, the birds hopping from
tree to tree after him, to return in the evening, drenched and soaked,
but with the same unquenchable flame of joy burning within him.

"Catch cold?" he would ask, "I've forgotten how to do it, I think. I
suppose it makes one's body more sensible always to sleep out-of-doors.
People who live indoors always remind me of something peeled and
skinless."

"Do you mean to say you slept out-of-doors last night in that deluge?"
asked Darcy. "And where, may I ask?"

Frank thought a moment.

"I slept in the hammock till nearly dawn," he said. "For I remember the
light blinked in the east when I awoke. Then I went--where did I
go?--oh, yes, to the meadow where the Pan-pipes sounded so close a week
ago. You were with me, do you remember? But I always have a rug if it
is wet."

And he went whistling upstairs.

Somehow that little touch, his obvious effort to recall where he had
slept, brought strangely home to Darcy the wonderful romance of which
he was the still half-incredulous beholder. Sleep till close on dawn in
a hammock, then the tramp--or probably scamper--underneath the windy
and weeping heavens to the remote and lonely meadow by the weir! The
picture of other such nights rose before him; Frank sleeping perhaps by
the bathing-place under the filtered twilight of the stars, or the
white blaze of moonshine, a stir and awakening at some dead hour,
perhaps a space of silent wide-eyed thought, and the