they were tired of scrambling about the gray walls there was a little copse hard by, the perfection of sylvan scenery on a small scale. The party speedily dispersed, rambling where their fancy led them, and were seen no more till the hour which had been fixed for dinner. Mrs. Latimer meanwhile chose a space of level turf, superintended the unpacking of hampers, and when the wanderers came dropping in by twos and threes from all points of the compass, professing unbounded readiness to help in the preparations, there was nothing left for them to do. Among the latest were Sissy and her squire, a radiant pair. She was charmed with her saucy sailor-boy, who had no serious intentions or hopes, who would most likely be gone on the morrow, and who asked nothing more than to be happy with her through that happy summer day. People and things were apt to grow perplexing and sad when they came into her every-day life, but here was a holiday companion, arrived as unexpectedly as if he were created for her holiday, with no such thing as an afterthought about the whole affair.
Latimer sulked, but his rival smiled, when the two young people arrived. For—thus argued Raymond Fothergill, with a vanity which was so calm, so clear, so certain that it sounded like reason itself—it was not possible that Sissy Langton preferred Carroll to himself. Even had it been Latimer or Hardwicke! But Carroll—no! Therefore she used the one cousin merely to avoid the other. But why did she wish to avoid him? He remembered her blushes, her shyness, the eyes that sank before his own, and he answered promptly that she feared him. He triumphed in the thought. He had contended against a gentle indifference on Sissy's part, till, having heard rumors of a bygone love-affair, he had suspected the existence of an unacknowledged constancy. Then what did this fear mean? It was obviously the self-distrust of a heart unwilling to yield, clinging to its old loyalty, yet aware of a new weakness—seeking safety in flight because unable to resist. Fothergill was conscious of power, and could wait with patience. (It would have been unreasonable to expect him to spend an equal amount of time and talent in accounting for Miss Langton's equally evident avoidance of young Latimer. Besides, that was a simple matter. He bored her, no doubt.)
When the business of eating and drinking was drawing to a close, little Edith Latimer, the youngest of the party, began to arrange a lapful of wild flowers which she had brought back from her ramble. Hardwicke, who had helped her to collect them, handed them to her one by one.
A green tuft which he held up caught Sissy's eye. "Why, Edie, what have you got there?" she said. "Is that maiden-hair spleenwort? Where did you find it?"
"In a crack in the wall: there's a lot more," the child answered; and at the same moment Hardwicke said, "Shall I get you some?"
"No: I'll get some," exclaimed Archie, who was lying at Sissy's feet. "Miss Langton would rather I got it for her, I know."
Sissy arched her brows.
"She has so much more confidence in me," Archie explained. "Please give me a leaf of that stuff, Miss Latimer: I want to see what it's like."
"My confidence is rather misplaced, I'm afraid, if you don't know what you are going to look for."
"Not a bit misplaced. You know very well I shall have a sort of instinct which will take me straight to it."
"Dear me! It hasn't any smell, you know," said Sissy with perfect gravity.
"Oh, how cruel!" said Carroll, "withering up my delicate feelings with thoughtless sarcasm! Smell? no! My what-d'ye-call-it—sympathy—will tell me which it is. My heart will beat faster as I approach it. But I'll have that leaf all the same, please."
"And it might be as well to know where to look for it."
"We found it in the ruins—in the wall of the refectory," said Hardwicke.
Sissy looked doubtful, but Carroll exclaimed, "Oh, I know! That's where the old fellows used to dine, isn't it? And had sermons read to them all the time."
"What a bore!" some one suggested.
"Well, I don't know about that," said Archie. "Sermons always are awful bores, ain't they? But I don't think I should mind 'em so much if I might eat my dinner all the time." He stopped with a comical look of alarm. "I say, we haven't got any parsons here, have we?"
"No," said Fothergill smiling. "We've brought the surgeon, in case of broken bones, but we've left the chaplain at home. So you may give us the full benefit of your opinions."
"I thought there wasn't one," Archie remarked, looking up at Sissy, "because nobody said grace. Or don't you ever say grace at a picnic?"
"I don't think you do," Sissy replied. "Unless it were a very Low Church picnic perhaps. I don't know, I'm sure."
"Makes a difference being out of doors, I suppose," said Archie, examining the little frond which Edith had given him. "And this is what you call maiden-hair?"
"What should you call it?"
"A libel," he answered promptly. "Maiden—hair, indeed! Why, I can see some a thousand times prettier quite close by. What can you want with this? You can't see the other, but I'll tell you what it's like. It's the most beautiful brown, with gold in it, and it grows in little ripples and waves and curls, and nothing ever was half so fine before, and it catches just the edge of a ray of sunshine—oh, don't move your head!—and looks like a golden glory—"
"Dear me!" said Sissy. "Then I'm afraid it's very rough."
"—And the least bit of it is worth a cartload of this green rubbish."
"Ah! But you see it is very much harder to get."
"Of course it is," said Archie. "But exchange is no robbery, they say. Suppose I go and dig up some of this, don't you think—remembering that I am a poor sailor-boy, going to be banished from 'England, home and beauty,' and that I shall most likely be drowned on my next voyage—don't you think—"
"I think that, on your own showing, you must get me at least a cartload of the other before you have the face to finish that sentence."
"A cartload! I feel like a prince in a fairy-tale. And what would you do with it all?"
"Well, I really hardly know what I should do with it."
"There now!" said Archie. "And I could tell you in a moment what I would do with mine if you gave it me."
"Oh, but I could tell you that."
"Tell me, then."
"You would fold it up carefully in a neat little bit of paper, but you would not write anything on it, because you would not like it to look business-like. Besides, you couldn't possibly forget. And a few months hence you will have lost your heart to some foreign young lady—I don't know where you are going—and you would find the little packet in your desk, and wonder who gave it to you."
"Oh, how little you know me!" Archie exclaimed, and sank back on the turf in a despairing attitude. But a moment later he began to laugh, and sat up again. "There was a bit once," he said confidentially, "and for the life of me I couldn't think whose it could be. There were two or three girls I knew it couldn't possibly belong to, but that didn't help me very far. That lock of hair quite haunted me. See what it is to have such susceptible feelings! I used to look at it a dozen times a day, and I couldn't sleep at night for thinking of it. At last I said to myself, 'I don't care whose it is: she was a nice, dear girl anyhow, and I'm sure she wouldn't like to think that she bothered me in this way.' So I consigned it to a watery grave. I felt very melancholy when it went, I can tell you, and if my own hair had been a reasonable length I'd have sent a bit of it overboard with hers, just for company's sake. But I'd had a fever, and I was cropped like a convict, so I couldn't."
"You tell that little story very nicely," said Sissy when he paused. "Do you always mention it when you ask—"
"Why, no," Archie exclaimed. "I thought you would take it as it was meant—as the greatest possible compliment to yourself. But I suppose it's my destiny to be misunderstood. Don't you see that I couldn't tell that to any one unless I were quite sure that she was so much higher, so altogether apart, that she never, never could get mixed up with anybody else in my mind?"
"She had better have some very particular sort of curliness in her hair too," said Sissy. "Don't you think it would be safer?"
"Oh,