always do on Sunday evenings."
He turns towards her; an expression of surprised delight upspringing into his eyes.
"Do you mean really?"
She is mollified, despite herself, by the simple joy beaming in his poor, good-looking face—face that would be more than good-looking if only some great grief would give it fuller expression; if only a few months of late hours and mundane dissipations would wear off its look of exuberant bucolic healthiness.
"No, no; I was only joking."
"Shall we sit here?" asks Brandon, presently, pointing to a rustic seat that stands under a great girthed oak, taller and thicker-foliaged than its neighbours. "See! did not I tell you true? Hardly a sunbeam pierces through these leaves, and the brawling of the brook comes up so pleasantly from below."
Esther looks, but the situation does not please her; it is too secluded, too sentimental; it looks like a seat on which Colin and Dowsabel might sit fluting and weaving
" … belts of straw and ivy buds,"
and simpering at one another over the tops of their crooks.
"I don't fancy it," she says, beginning to walk on; "it looks earwiggy."
"Only the other day you said it was quite a lovers' seat!" he exclaims, in surprise.
"Exactly; and for that very reason I prefer waiting till I am more qualified to sit upon it."
By-and-by Miss Craven finds a position that suits her better; one nearer the edge of the wood, in full view of the Naullan road, along which market women, coal carts, stray limping tramps, go passing, and where loverly blandishments are out of the question.
The sun slides down between two birch stems that stand amid rock fragments, and riots at his will about her head, as she sits at the birch foot on a great grey stone, all flourished over with green mosses and little clinging plants. Below, the baby river runs tinkling; it is such a baby river that it has not strength to grapple with the boulders that lie in its bed; it comes stealing round their hoary sides with a coaxing noise, in gentlest swirls and bubbled eddies. The squirrels brought their nuts last autumn to Esther's stone to crack; the shells are lying there still; she is picking them up and dropping them again in idle play. Little dancing lights are flashing down through the birch's feathery-green locks, and playing Hide and Seek over Esther's gown and Robert's recumbent figure, as he lies in the repose of warmth, absolute idleness, absolute content at her feet. An hour and a half, two hours to be spent in trying to like Robert! Faugh! She yawns.
"That is the seventh time you have yawned since we have been here," remarks her lover, a little reproachfully.
"I dare say; and if you wait five minutes longer, you will probably be able to tell me that it is the seventy-seventh time."
"You did not yawn while we were indoors."
"I had my work; what is a woman without her work? A dismounted dragoon—a pump without water!" She stretches out her arms lazily, to embrace the dry, warm air. "Does every one find being courted as tedious a process as I do?" (Aside.) Aloud: "Some one said to me the other day, that no woman could be happy who was not fond of work. It is putting one's felicity on rather a low level, but I believe it is true."
"In the same way as no man can be good-tempered who is not fond of smoking," says Bob, starting a rival masculine proposition.
"I don't know anything at all about men," replies Esther, exhaustively. "No woman in the world can have a more limited acquaintance with the masculine gender than I have."
"You are young yet," says Brandon, consolingly.
"I was seventeen last May, if you call that young," she answers, her thoughts recurring to "Heartsease," the heroine of which is
"Wooed and married and a'"
before her sixteenth birthday.
"You are eight years younger than I am."
"Am I?" carelessly, as if such comparative statistics were profoundly uninteresting to her.
"Yes; I am glad there is so much difference in age between us."
"Why?"
"Because you are the more likely to outlive me."
She passes by the little sentimentalism with silent contempt. "I shall certainly outlive you," she says confidently. "Women mostly outlive men, even when they are of the same age. We lead slower, safer lives. If I spend all my life here, I shall probably creep on, like a tortoise, to a hundred."
"But you will not spend all your life here?" he cries, eagerly.
She shrugs her shoulders. "Cela dépend. I shall live here as long as Jack remains unmarried."
"That will not be very long, I prophesy," cries Brandon, cheerfully. "A farmer requires a wife more than most men."
"More than a soldier, certainly," retorts she, with a malicious smile.
He laughs; too warm and lazy and content to be offended, and makes ineffectual passes at a gnat that has settled upon his nose. "Has he never yet shown even a preference for any one?" he asks, feeling a more personal interest than he had ever before experienced in Jack's amours and amourettes.
"Not that I am aware of; Jack and I never show preferences for any one, nor does any one ever show a preference for us; we are a good deal too poor to be in any demand."
"I am glad of it."
"You may have the doubtful satisfaction of knowing that no one ever showed the slightest inclination to be your rival."
"So much the better; I don't want you any the less because nobody else wants you."
"Don't you? 'A poor thing, but mine own,' that is your motto, I suppose?"
A pause. An old woman, with a myriad-wrinkled Welsh face rides by along the road on a drooping-headed donkey; a large blue and orange handkerchief tied over her bonnet and a basket on each arm.
Esther watches her as she jogs along with a feeling of envy. Fortunate, fortunate old woman! she has no lover!
"I wish you would not look so happy," Miss Craven says suddenly, flashing round an uneasy look out of her great black eyes at her companion.
"Why should not I? I am happy."
"But you have no right to be, no reason for being so," she cries, emphatically.
"I have, at all events, as much reason as the birds have and they seem pretty jolly; I am alive, and the sun is shining."
"You were alive, and the sun was shining, this time yesterday," she says drily; "but you were not so happy then as you are now."
At the decided damper to his hilarity so evidently intended in this speech, a slight cloud passes over the young man's face; he looks down with a snubbed expression.
"I suppose I am over-sanguine about everything," he says,
