glossy curl, carefully let to escape from the waved and banded hair beneath the gypsy hat.  Exquisite from head to foot, the figure had no place in the unpruned, untrained, savage, and primeval beauty of those woods.  Smooth sward, with jets of water and carven nymphs embowered in clipped box or yew, should have been its setting, and not this wild and tangled growth, this license of bird and beast and growing things.  And yet the incongruous riot, the contrast of profuse, untended beauty, enhanced the value of the picture, gave it piquancy and a completer charm.

When they were within a few feet of the coach and horses and negroes, all drowsing in the sunny road, Haward made as if to speak, but she stopped him with her lifted hand.  “Spare me,” she begged.  “It is bad enough as it is, but words would make it worse.  If ever a day might come—­I do not think that I am unlovely; I even rate myself so highly as to think that I am worthy of your love.  If ever the day shall come when you can say to me, ’Now I see that love is no tinted dream; now I ask you to be my wife indeed,’ then, upon that day—­But until then ask not of me what you asked back there among the violets.  I, too, am proud”—­Her voice broke.

“Evelyn!” he cried.  “Poor child—­poor friend”—­

She turned her face upon him.  “Don’t!” she said, and her lips were smiling, though her eyes were full of tears.  “We have forgot that it is May Day, and that we must be light of heart.  Look how white is that dogwood-tree!  Break me a bough for my chimney-piece at Williamsburgh.”

He brought her a branch of the starry blossoms.  “Did you notice,” she asked, “that the girl who ran—­Audrey—­wore dogwood in her hair?  You could see her heart beat with very love of living.  She was of the woods, like a dryad.  Had the prizes been of my choosing, she should have had a gift more poetical than a guinea.”

Haward opened the coach door, and stood gravely aside while she entered the vehicle and took her seat, depositing her flowers upon the cushions beside her.  The Colonel stirred, uncrossed his legs, yawned, pulled the handkerchief from his face, and opened his eyes.

“Faith!” he exclaimed, straightening himself, and taking up his radiant humor where, upon falling-asleep, he had let it drop.  “The way must have suddenly become smooth as a road in Venice, for I’ve felt no jolting this half hour.  Flowers, Evelyn? and Haward afoot?  You’ve been on a woodland saunter, then, while I enacted Solomon’s sluggard!” The worthy parent’s eyes began to twinkle.  “What flowers did you find?  They have strange blooms here, and yet I warrant that even in these woods one might come across London pride and none-so-pretty and forget-me-not”—­