rainbow-colored flowers, I wish them away.

Alas! that life should be both so quick and so lagging! It is afternoon,
and I am lying by myself on a cloak at the bottom of the punt--the
_unupsettable_, broad-bottomed punt. My elbow rests on the seat, and a
book is on my lap. But, in the middle of the pool, the glare from the
water is unbearably bright, but _here_, underneath those dipping,
drooped trees, the sun only filters through in little flakes, and the
shade is brown, and the reflections are so vivid that the flags hardly
know which are themselves--they, or the other flags that grow in the
water at their feet.

A while ago I tried to read; but a private vexation of my own--a small
new one--interleaved with its details each page of the story, and made
nonsense of it. I have shut the volume, therefore, and, with my hat
tilted over my eyes, and my cheek on my hand, am watching the long blue
dragon-flies, and the numberless small peoples that inhabit the summer
air. All at once, I hear some one coming, crashing and pushing through
the woody undergrowth. Perhaps it is Algy come to say that he has
changed his mind, and that he will not go after all! No! it is only Mr.
Musgrave. I am a little disappointed, but, as my fondness for my own
company is always of the smallest, I am able to smile a sincere welcome.

"It is you, is it?" I say, with a little intimate nod. "How did you know
where I was?"

"Barbara told me."

"_Barbara_, indeed!" (laughing). "I wish father could hear you."

"I am very glad he does not."

"And so you found her at home?" I say, with a feeling of pleased
curiosity, as to the details of the interview. (He cannot well have
volunteered the abbey _already_, can he?)

"I suppose I may come in," he says, hardly waiting my permission to jump
into the punt, which, however, by reason of the noble broadness of its
bottom, is enabled to bid defiance to any such shock. "She was making a
flannel petticoat for an old woman," he goes on, sitting down opposite
me, and looking at me from under his hat-brim, with gravely shining
eyes; "_herring-boning_, she called it. She has been teaching me how to
herring-bone. I like Barbara."

"How kind of you!" I say, ironically, and yet a little gratified too.
"And does she return the compliment, may I ask?"

He nods.

"Yes, I think so."

"She would like you better still if you were to lose all your money, and
one of your legs, and be marked by the small-pox," I say