“It was most awfully sweet of you to put your stars on my beasts.  It was just about the most sweet thing you could have done.  I am an awful brute, but, of course, if I had only known what you were doing, I should have loved it.  Do forgive me; I deserve it, I know—­only it is my birthday.

“Your sorrowful

“Mark.”

He took this down, slipped it under her door, tapped so that she might notice it, and stole away.  It relieved his mind a little, and he went downstairs again.

Back in the greenhouse, sitting on a stool, he ruefully contemplated those chapletted beasts.  They consisted of a crow, a sheep, a turkey, two doves, a pony, and sundry fragments.  She had fastened the jessamine sprigs to the tops of their heads by a tiny daub of wet clay, and had evidently been surprised trying to put a sprig into the mouth of one of the doves, for it hung by a little thread of clay from the beak.  He detached it and put it in his buttonhole.  Poor little Sylvia! she took things awfully to heart.  He would be as nice as ever he could to her all day.  And, balancing on his stool, he stared fixedly at the wall against which she had fallen back; the line of her soft chin and throat seemed now to be his only memory.  It was very queer how he could see nothing but that, the way the throat moved, swallowed—­so white, so soft.  And he had made it go like that!  It seemed an unconscionable time till breakfast.

As the hour approached he haunted the hall, hoping she might be first down.  At last he heard footsteps, and waited, hidden behind the door of the empty dining-room, lest at sight of him she should turn back.  He had rehearsed what he was going to do—­bend down and kiss her hand and say:  “Dulcinea del Toboso is the most beautiful lady in the world, and I the most unfortunate knight upon the earth,” from his favourite passage out of his favourite book, ’Don Quixote.’  She would surely forgive him then, and his heart would no longer hurt him.  Certainly she could never go on making him so miserable if she knew his feelings!  She was too soft and gentle for that.  Alas! it was not Sylvia who came; but Anna, fresh from sleep, with her ice-green eyes and bright hair; and in sudden strange antipathy to her, that strong, vivid figure, he stood dumb.  And this first lonely moment, which he had so many times in fancy spent locked in her arms, passed without even a kiss; for quickly one by one the others came.  But of Sylvia only news through Mrs. Doone that she had a headache, and was staying in bed.  Her present was on the sideboard, a book called ‘Sartor Resartus.’  “Mark—­from Sylvia, August 1st, 1880,” together with Gordy’s cheque, Mrs. Doone’s pearl pin, old Tingle’s ‘Stones of Venice,’ and one other little parcel wrapped in tissue-paper—­four ties of varying shades of green, red, and blue, hand-knitted in silk—­a present of how many hours made short by the thought that he would wear the produce of that clicking.  He did not fail in outer gratitude, but did he realize what had been knitted into those ties?  Not then.