t never happened--for stories wherewith to while away the
time, as Fina ran alone, happy in picking the spring flowers growing
thick on the banks and hedgerows. Thus the one was amused and the
other was left to herself undisturbed; which was an arrangement that
kept Leam's good intentions intact, but prevented the penance which
they included from becoming too burdensome. Indeed, her penance was so
light that she thought it not so great a hardship, after all, to make
little Fina her companion in her rambles if she would but run on alone
and content herself with picking flowers that neither scratched nor
stung, and where therefore neither the surgery of needles nor the
dressing of dock-leaves was required, nor yet the supplementary
soothing of kisses and caresses for her tearful, sobbing, angry pain.

The Broad, always one of the prettiest points in the landscape, was
to-day in one of its most interesting phases. The sloping banks were
golden with globe-flowers and marsh "mary-buds," and round the margin,
was a broad belt of silver where the starry white ranunculus grew. All
sorts of the beautiful aquatic plants of spring were flowering--some
near the edges, apparently just within reach, tempting and perilous,
and some farther off and manifestly hopeless: the leaves of the
water-lilies, which later would be set like bosses of silver and gold
on the shimmering blue, had risen to the surface in broad, green,
shining platters, and the low-lying branches of the trees at the edge
dipped in the water and swayed with the running stream.

It was the loveliest bit of death and danger to be found for miles
round--so lovely that it might well have tempted the sorrowful to take
their rest for ever in a grave so sweet, so eloquent of eternal peace.
Even Leam, with all the unspoken yearnings, the formless hopes, of
youth stirring in her heart, thought how pleasant it would be to go to
sleep among the flowers and wake up only when she had found mamma in
heaven; while Fina, dazzled by the rank luxuriance before her, ran
forward to the water's edge with a shrill cry of delight.

Leam called to her to stand back, to come away from the water and the
bank, which, shelving abruptly, was a dangerous place for a child. The
footing was insecure and the soil treacherous--by no means a proper
playground for the rash, uncertain feet of six. Twice or thrice Leam
called, but Fina would not hear, and began gathering the flowers with
the bold haste o