grass, and all that the Earth bears, as if one had
conversed face to face with the great god Pan himself.

But while Iden slumbered with his head against the panel--think, think,
think--this shallow world of ours, this petty threescore years and ten,
was slipping away. Already Amaryllis had marked with bitterness at heart
the increasing stoop of the strong back.

Iden was like the great engineer who could never build a bridge, because
he knew so well how a bridge ought to be built.

"Such a fuss over a mess of a gate," said Mrs. Iden, "making yourself
ridiculous: I believe that carpenter is just taking advantage of you.
Why can't you go into town and see your father?--it would be a hundred
pounds in your pocket"--as it would have been, no doubt. If only Mrs.
Iden had gone about her lecture in a pleasanter manner perhaps he would
have taken her advice.

Resting upon the brown timber in the grass Amaryllis and Amadis could
just see a corner of the old house through the spars of the new gate.
Coombe Oaks was a grown house, if you understand; a house that had grown
in the course of many generations, not built to set order; it had grown
like a tree that adapts itself to circumstances, and, therefore, like
the tree it was beautiful to look at. There were windows in deep
notches, between gables where there was no look-out except at the pears
on the wall, awkward windows, quite bewildering. A workman came to mend
one one day, and could not get at it. "Darned if I ever seed such a
crooked picter of a house!" said he.

A kingfisher shot across above the golden surface of the buttercups,
straight for the brook, moving, as it seemed, without wings, so swiftly
did he vibrate them, that only his azure hue was visible, drawn like a
line of peacock blue over the gold.

In the fitness of things Amaryllis ought not to have been sitting there
like this, with Amadis lost in the sweet summer dream of love.

She ought to have loved and married a Launcelot du Lake, a hero of the
mighty arm, only with the income of Sir Gorgius Midas: that is the
proper thing.

But the fitness of things never comes to pass--everything happens in the
Turkish manner.

Here was Amaryllis, very strong and full of life, very, very young and
inexperienced, very poor and without the least expectation whatever (for
who could reconcile the old and the older Iden?), the daughter of poor
and embarrassed parents, whom she wished and prayed to help in their
comin