don't believe
you ever saw them yourself."

"I tell you I did," he protested hotly.

"Were you up the tree?" she pressed, looking him through with eyes that
then and always wrenched the prosaic truth from him.

He flushed more redly than in his eagerness of showing the nest, his
eyes fell, he stammered.

"Well," said he, "I did not climb the tree. What is the good when I know
what is there? It is a heron's nest."

"But there might have been no eggs and no birds in it at all," she
argued.

"That's just it," said he eagerly. "Lots of boys would be for climbing
and finding that out, and think how vexatious it would be after all that
trouble! I just made the eggs and the young ones out of my own mind, and
that is far better."

At the innocence of the explanation Nan laughed till the woods rang. Her
brown hair fell upon her neck and brow, the flowers tumbled at her feet
all mingled and beautiful as if summer has been raining on its queen. A
bird rose from the thicket, chuck-chucking in alarm, then fled, trailing
behind him a golden chain of melody.

CHAPTER XIII--A GHOST

I think that in the trees, the dryads, the leaf-haunters invisible, so
sad in childlessness, ceased their swinging to look upon the boy and
girl so enviable in their innocence and happiness. Gilian knelt and
gathered up the flowers. It was, perhaps, more to hide his vexation than
from courtesy that he did so, but the act was so unboylike, so deferring
in its manner, that it restored to Nan as much of her good humour as her
laughter had not brought back with it. As he lifted the flowers and put
them together, there seemed to come from the fresh lush stalks of them
some essence of the girl whose hands had culled and grasped them, a
feeling of her warm palm. And when handing her the re-gathered flowers
he felt the actual touch of her fingers, his head for a second swam. He
wondered. For in the touch there had been something even more potent
and pleasing than in the mother-touch of Miss Mary's hand that day when
first he came to the town, the mother-touch that revealed a world not
of kindness alone--for that was not new, he had it from the little old
woman whose face was like a nut--but of understanding and sympathy.

"Have you any more wonders to show?" said Nan, now all in the humour of
adventure.

"Nothing you would care for," he said. "There are lots of places just
for thinking at, but----"

"I would rather them to be places to be see