lanced up at him. His laughing eyes
were glowing down upon her under his heavy mat of hair. She sat up and
looked toward the wagon crawling away in the distance; her father was no
longer in sight.

One of the ewes, dissatisfied with a back view, stamped her forefoot
impatiently, and ran round in front, and out into the sun. Her lambs
followed, and the three, ranging themselves abreast, stared at Daphne,
with a look of helpless inquiry.

"Sh-pp-pp!" she cried, throwing up her hands at them, irritated. "Go
away!"

They turned and ran; the others followed; and the whole number, falling
into line, took a path meekly homeward. They left a greater sense of
privacy under the tree. Several yards off was a small stock-pond. Around
the edge of this the water stood hot and green in the tracks of the
cattle and the sheep, and about these pools the yellow butterflies were
thick, alighting daintily on the promontories of the mud, or rising two
by two through the dazzling atmosphere in columns of enamored flight.

Daphne leaned over to the blue grass where it swayed unbroken in the
breeze, and drew out of their sockets several stalks of it, bearing on
their tops the purplish seed-vessels. With them she began to braid a
ring about one of her fingers in the old simple fashion of the country.

As they talked, he lay propped on his elbow, watching her fingers, the
soft slow movements of which little by little wove a spell over his
eyes. And once again the power of her beauty began to draw him beyond
control. He felt a desire to seize her hands, to crush them in his. His
eyes passed upward along her tapering wrists, the skin of which was like
mother-of-pearl; upward along the arm to the shoulder--to her neck--to
her deeply crimsoned cheeks--to the purity of her brow--to the purity of
her eyes, the downcast lashes of which hid them like conscious fringes.

An awkward silence began to fall between them. Daphne felt that the time
had come for her to speak. But, powerless to begin, she feigned to busy
herself all the more devotedly with braiding the deep-green circlet.
Suddenly he drew himself through the grass to her side.

"Let _me_!"

"No!" she cried, lifting her arm above his reach and looking at him with
a gay threat. "You don't know how."

"I do know how," he said, with his white teeth on his red underlip, and
his eyes sparkling; and reaching upward, he laid his hand in the hollow
of her elbow and pulled her arm down.

"No! N