e lark sang his sweet song high above their heads, and the sweet,
clear notes of distant thrushes and blackbirds came from the low lying
copses, which fringe the head of the Ebbor valley.

Harry and Bunny chased moths for Piers: Ralph meditated and repeated to
himself some lines of a Greek poet which he wanted to get by heart.

Thus, as was only to be expected, Joyce and Mr Arundel were left to
themselves, and in Gilbert's heart at least was the weight of coming
separation, and the uncertainty as to whether he should ever be able to
renew the sweet, free intercourse of the past fortnight. He dreaded to
change the present happy relations between him and Joyce by telling her
what he felt. She confided so entirely in him; she told him so much of
her little joys, and home happiness, of Ralph's cleverness, of Harry and
Bunny's frantic desires to be sailors, of her father's goodness to
Melville, and infinite patience with him. On this last night especially,
he felt that he could not bring himself to break the spell, and disturb
the serenity of that sweet, pure life, by letting friendship go, to
replace it by the more tumultuous and passionate love, which he knew if
once this barrier were broken down, he should pour forth on her in a
torrent which might distress and almost frighten, one so simple and so
unversed in the world's ways.

Whilst Charlotte was always on the look-out for some _preux chevalier_,
who was to be at her feet and vow eternal devotion, Joyce had as yet no
such airy castles. Her education had been widely different from her
cousin's, and home and home interests had so filled her seventeen years
with their joys and pleasures, that she had no time to dream over
"keepsakes," and read Miss Burney's romances, or steep herself in the
unreality of sentimental verses, which Wordsworth was beginning to break
down and send into the shadows, by bringing out the beauties of
creation into the strong light, which his genius threw around them.

Joyce had not wasted her youth in foolish dreams of impossible
perfection, but when the real story of her life was ready to unfold
itself, she would find a zest and fulness in it, that the sentimental
visionary could never know.

That was a memorable walk over the sweet country side, with the west all
aglow, and the sky above serenely blue. In after years both looked back
on it through that mist of tender sadness, which gathers round the happy
past of youth, even though the prese