ER'S DAUGHTER FEELS HERSELF A GODDESS

Loveday bore home the milk in a maze of bliss, and staying not for her
supper, for no hunger of the body was upon her, turned and went out
again into the glow of the evening. Had she been as full of sensibility
as a young lady she would have wandered straight away from Upper Farm,
forgotten the milk, and not thought of it again, till, returning with
the upgetting of the moon, her aunt had met her with vulgar reproaches.
What a charming scene could then have been staged, of sensitive genius
misunderstood by coarse-grained labour; of vision-drunken youth berated
by undreaming age! But she was not a young lady, and could derive no
felicity from forgetfulness of such a kind, for with the poor the
urgencies of the immediate task are raised to such compelling interest
that only a genius could neglect them with satisfaction. Therefore
Loveday never thought of forgetting the milk for her aunt, but her
exultation was of such a powerful sort that it upheld her through the
commonplaces of routine without her perceiving the incongruity which
would have jarred on one of a finer upbringing.

She placed the milk on the table, set out the bread and soaked
pilchards, found what was left of the cheese, and went hastily forth
lest her aunt should stay her.

She was bound for the little wood that lay in a fold of the moorland
above the sea. This wood was to her what a City of Refuge was to the
Hebrews of the Old Testament, and, like them, she fled to it when the
world's opinion of what was fit had proved at variance with her own.
To-night she went to it not for sanctuary from others, but to commune
with herself--in truth, for the first time she went not because of what
she had left but because of what she would find. Her bare heels were
winged along the road.

The wood lay lapped in the shadow that the western ridge had cast on it
an hour earlier than the rest of the world's bedtime, ever since the
trees had been there to receive the chill caress, and that was for many
a hundred years. Old Madgy swore that even in her young day the small
folk had still held their revels on the mossy slopes amongst the fanlike
roots, and who knows what larger folk had not fled there to wanton more
sweetly than in close cottages, or, like Loveday, to play the more
easily with their thoughts? The wood alone knew, and it held its
memories as closely as it held the thousand tiny lives confided to its
care; the bright