h the vesper hymns and serenades of
plumed worshippers and lovers.

It was a place to quicken the heart and tongue of any wooer. The breezes
moved pensively and without a sound. On the middle surface of the water
the sunshine lay in wide bands, liquid-bordered under over-hanging
boughs by glimmering shadows that wove lace in their sleep. Between the
stream and the steep ground ran an abandoned road fringed with ferns,
its brown pine-fallings flecked with a sunlight that fell through the
twined arms and myriad green fingers of all-namable sorts of great and
lesser trees. You would have said the forest's every knight and lady,
dwarf, page, and elf--for in this magical seclusion all the world's
times were tangled into one--had come to the noiseless dance of some
fairy's bridal; chestnut and hemlock, hazel and witch-hazel, walnut and
willow, birches white and yellow, poplar and ash in feathery bloom, the
lusty oaks in the scarred harness of their winter wars under new tabards
of pink and silver-green, and the slim service-bush, white with blooms
and writhing in maiden shame of her too transparent gown. In each
tangled ravine Flora's little pious mortals of the May--anemone, yellow
violet, blood-root, mustard, liverwort, and their yet humbler neighbors
and kin--heard mass, or held meeting--whichever it was--and slept for
blissful lack of brain while Jack-in-the-pulpit preached to them, under
Solomon's seal, and oriole, tanager, warbler, thrush, up in the
choir-loft, made love between the hymns, ate tidbits, and dropped crumbs
upon wake-robin, baby-toes, and the nodding columbine.

Was it so? Or was it but fantasy in the mind of Henry Fair alone,
reflected from the mood of the girl at whose side he walked here, and
whose "Herrick" he vainly tried to beguile from her in hope that so she
might better heed his words? It may be. The joy of spring was in her
feet, the colors of the trees were answered in her robes. Moreover, the
flush of the orchards and breath of the meadows through which they had
gone and come again were on her cheek and in her parted lips, the
red-brown depths of the stream were in her hair and lashes, and above
them a cunningly disordered thing of fine straw and loose ribbons
matched the head and face it shaded, as though all were parts together
of some flower unspoiled by the garden's captivity and escaped again
into the woods.

To Barbara's ear Fair's speech had always been melodious and low. Its
well-tem