e was riding.

I do not believe I slept a minute that night through thinking of her,
and feeling glad that I was near her, and that she had been riding with
her father.

When the early dawn began to break an idea brighter than the dawn broke
upon me: I would get up and go nearer to her. It is amazing how much
we lose by not getting up early on the long summer days. How beautiful
the morning might be on this earth I never knew until I found myself
wandering by the edge of my woods and over my lawn with the tender
gray-blue sky above me and all the freshness of the grass and flowers
and trees about me, the birds singing among the branches, and she
sleeping sweetly somewhere within that house with its softly defined
lights and shadows. How I wished I knew what room she occupied!

The beauties and joys of that hour were lost to every person on the
place, who were all, no doubt, in their soundest sleep. I did not even
see a dog. Quietly and stealthily stepping from bush to hedge, I went
around the house, and as I drew near the barn I fancied I could hear
from a little room adjoining it the snores of the coachman. The lazy
rascal would probably not awaken for two or three hours yet, but I
would ran no risks, and in half an hour I had sped away.

Now I knew exactly why I was staying at the house of the miller. I was
doing so in order that I might go early in the mornings to my own home,
in which the girl I loved lay dreaming, and that for the rest of the
day and much of the night I might think of her.

"What place in Europe," I said to myself, "could be so beautiful, so
charming, and so helpful to reflection as this sequestered lake, these
noble trees, these stretches of undulating meadow?"

Even if I should care to go abroad, a month or two later would answer
all my purposes. Why had I ever thought of spending five months away?

There was a pretty stream which ran from the lake and wended its way
through a green and shaded valley, and here, with a rod, I wandered and
fished and thought. The miller had boats, and in one of these I rowed
far up the lake where it narrowed into a creek, and between the high
hills which shut me out from the world I would float and think.

Every morning, soon after break of day, I went to my home and wandered
about my grounds. If it rained I did not mind that. I like a summer
rain.

Day by day I grew bolder. Nobody in that household thought of getting
up until seven o'clock.