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, this is too much!" he exclaimed. "It's sport to you, evidently, but you don't consider that it's death to me. I say, come away, and we'll look for this green stuff."
Fothergill smiled, but Latimer's handsome face flushed. He had made a dozen attempts to supplant Carroll, and had been foiled by the laughing pair. What was the use of being a good-looking fellow of six-and-twenty, head of one of the county families and owner of Latimer's Court and Ashendale, if he were to be set aside by a beggarly sailor-boy? What did Fothergill mean by bringing his poor relations dragging after him where they were not wanted? He sprang to his feet, and went away with long strides to make violent love to the farmer's rosy little daughter. He knew that he meant nothing at all, and that he was filling the poor child's head and heart with the vainest of hopes. He knew that he owed especial respect and consideration to the daughter of his tenant, a man who had dealt faithfully by him, and whose father and grandfather had held Ashendale under the Latimers. He felt that he was acting meanly even while he kissed little Lucy by the red wall where the apricots were ripening in the sun. And he had no overmastering passion for excuse: what did he care for little Lucy? He was doing wrong, and he was doing it because it was wrong. He was in a fiercely antagonistic mood, and, as he could not fight Fothergill and Carroll, he fought with his own sense of truth and honor, for want of a better foe. And Lucy, conscious of her rosy prettiness, stood shyly pulling the lavender-heads in a glad bewilderment of vanity, wonder and delight, while Latimer's heart was full of jealous anger. If Sissy Langton could amuse herself, so could he.
But Sissy was too happily absorbed in her amusement to think of his. She had avoided him, as she had avoided Captain Fothergill, from a sense of danger. They were becoming too serious, too much in earnest, and she did not want to be serious. So she went gayly across the grass, laughing at Archie because he would look on level ground for her maiden-hair spleenwort. They came to a small enclosure.
"Here you are!" said Carroll. "This is what somebody said was the refectory. It makes one feel quite sad and sentimental only to think what a lot of jolly dinners have been eaten here. And nothing left of it all!"
"That's your idea of sentiment, Mr. Carroll? It sounds to me as if you hadn't had enough to eat."
"Oh yes, I had plenty. But we ought to pledge each other in a cup of sack, or something of the kind. And a place like this ought at least to smell deliciously of roast and boiled. Instead of which it might as well be the chapel."
Sissy gazed up at the wall: "There's some maiden-hair! How was it I never saw it this morning? Surely, we came along the top and looked down into this place."
"No," said Archie. "That was the chapel we looked into. Didn't I say they were just alike?"
"Well, I can easily get up there," she said. "And you may stay down here if you like, and grow sentimental over the ghost of a dinner." And, laughing, she darted up a steep ascent of turf, slackening her pace when she came to a rough heap of fallen stones. Carroll was by her side directly, helping her. "Why, this is prettier than where we went
