thrilling and
joyous changes of the dawn, were over; and now, in the hot eye of the
day, she turned uneasily and looked sighingly about her. Some way off
among the lower woods a pillar of smoke was mounting and melting in the
gold and blue. There, surely enough, were human folk, the
hearth-surrounders. Man's fingers had laid the twigs; it was man's
breath that had quickened and encouraged the baby flames; and now, as
the fire caught, it would be playing ruddily on the face of its creator.
At the thought, she felt a-cold and little and lost in that great
out-of-doors. The electric shock of the young sunbeams and the unhuman
beauty of the woods began to irk and daunt her. The covert of the house,
the decent privacy of rooms, the swept and regulated fire, all that
denotes or beautifies the home life of man, began to draw her as with
cords. The pillar of smoke was now risen into some stream of moving air;
it began to lean out sideways in a pennon; and thereupon, as though the
change had been a summons, Seraphina plunged once more into the
labyrinth of the wood.

She left day upon the high ground. In the lower groves there still
lingered the blue early twilight and the seizing freshness of the dew.
But here and there, above this field of shadow, the head of a great
outspread pine was already glorious with day; and here and there,
through the breaches of the hills, the sunbeams made a great and
luminous entry. Here Seraphina hastened along forest paths. She had lost
sight of the pilot smoke, which blew another way, and conducted herself
in that great wilderness by the direction of the sun. But presently
fresh signs bespoke the neighbourhood of man; felled trunks, white
slivers from the axe, bundles of green boughs, and stacks of firewood.
These guided her forward; until she came forth at last upon the clearing
whence the smoke arose. A hut stood in the clear shadow, hard by a brook
which made a series of inconsiderable falls; and on the threshold the
Princess saw a sun-burnt and hard-featured woodman, standing with his
hands behind his back and gazing sky-ward.

She went to him directly; a beautiful, bright-eyed, and haggard vision;
splendidly arrayed and pitifully tattered; the diamond ear-drops still
glittering in her ears; and with the movement of her coming, one small
breast showing and hiding among the ragged covert of the laces. At that
ambiguous hour, and coming as she did from the great silence of the
forest, the m