-eyed shrew-mice that poked quivering noses through the
litter of last year's leaves, the birds that nested behind the
clustering twigs, the slow-worms that slipped along its grassy ditches.

Loveday turned off from the road and approached the wood from the west,
pausing when she reached the smooth grey boulders that were piled along
the ridge. She stood there gazing out over the smiling champaign, pale
and verdant from the farthest rim to the treetops that made as it were a
sea of faint green at her feet, for already in that soft clime the twigs
were misty with young leaf, and on the willows the velvety pearl-hued
ovals had begun to deck themselves with a delicate powdering of gold,
while from the hazels beside her the yellow lambs' tails hung still as
tiny pennants in the evening air. The gold of nature was as yet more
vivid than her green, which still showed tentative, enquiring of April
what of betrayal might not lie in the careless plaits of her garment.
To Loveday, high on her rock, between the gold of the sky and the gold
of the blossom, it seemed that April must of a certainty stay as fair
as this and lead to as bright a May, when that vision of her new self
should become a yet brighter reality. She was confident of April because
she was confident of life, lapped in an aureate glow that seemed to
suffuse the very air she drew into her lungs so that it intoxicated her
like the breath of a diviner ether from Olympian heights. She had seen
beauty, and lo! it had been revealed to her not as a thing apart and
unattainable, but as a quality within herself. Her "difference" had
become a blazon, not a branding.

Lying down on her rock, she told over with the rapture of a devotee the
divine excellencies of Flora Le Pettit; her radiance, her swinging,
shining curls, the wings that spread from her fair arms, the light that
gleamed on her bright brow and in her glancing eyes, but it was not
Flora, but Loveday, who danced before her mind's eye in white raiment,
and held the sorrows of the South in her eyes and the joy of youth on
her lips. Flora was the excuse for that new Loveday, as the beloved is
ever the excuse for the raptures transmuting the lover. Even thus do we
worship in our Creator the excellence of His handiwork, and one would
think that to be alive is act of praise enough to satisfy the most
exigent deity. Flora had called Loveday to life, and Loveday repaid her
with a worship of that which she had awakened, the