'L'amour est une source naÏve, partie de son lit de cresson, de fleurs, de gravier, qui, riviÈre, qui, fleuve, change de nature et d'aspect À chaque flot.'—De Balzac.

In England Spring is a poem. In the Highlands of Scotland she has the intensity of a passion. The crags and steeps are possessed by her; they stand transfigured like a stern man in the eyes of his bride. And here in these solemn depths and lonely heights, as nowhere else, shy Spring abandons herself, secure in the fastnesses where her every freak is loved. She sets the broom ablaze among the gray rocks, yellow along the river's edge, yet hardly yellower than the leaves on the young oak just above. The larches hear her voice, and hundred by hundred peep over each other's heads upon the hillside, all a-tremble with fairy green. The shoots of the dwarf cherry, scattered wide upon the uplands, are pink among the grass. The primroses are everywhere, though it is Whitsuntide—behind the stones, among the broom, beside the little tumbling streams, in every crevice, and on every foothold. The mountain-ash holds its white blossoms aloft in its careful spreading fingers. Even the silver birch forgets its sadness while spring reigns in Scotland.

There are those to whom she speaks of love, but there are many more to whom she whispers, 'Be comforted.' When hope leaves us, it is well to go out into the woods and listen to what Spring has to say. Though life is gray, the primroses are coming up all the same, and the young shafts of the bluebell pierce the soft earth in spite of our heartache. A hedge-sparrow has built him a house in the nearest tangle of white hawthorn. There will be children's voices in it presently. Be comforted. Hope is gone, but not lost. You shall meet her again in the faces of the children, God's other primroses. She is not lost. She has only taken her hand out of yours. Be comforted.

But Sibyl refused to be comforted. Her love for Mr. Loftus, if small things may be called by large names, was the first violent emotion of a feeble and impulsive mind in a feeble body, both swayed by veering influences, both shaken by the changing currents of early womanhood, as a silver birch is shaken with its leaves.

A woman with a deeper heart, and with a slight perception of Mr. Loftus's character, would have reverently folded her devotion in her heart and have gone on her way ennobled by it. But with Sibyl, to admire anything was to wish to possess it; to tire of anything was to cast it away.

Mr. Loftus was in her eyes without an equal in the world. Therefore—the reasoning from her point of view was conclusive—she must marry him. She had no knowledge, she had not even a glimpse, of the gulf of feeling, far wider than the gulf of years, which separated him from her. She imagined no one appreciated him, or entered into the dark places of his mind, as she did. She mistook his patient comprehension of her trivial aspirations, and his unfailing kindness to all young and crude ideas, for the perfect sympathy of two kindred souls, and was wont to speak mysteriously to Peggy of how minds that were really related drew each other out and enriched each other.

It is always a dangerous experiment to awaken a sleeping soul to the pageant of life. Mr. Loftus had endeavoured to do this for Sibyl, consciously, gently, with great care, out of the mixed admiration and pity with which she inspired him, in the hope that, in later years, when her feet would be swept from under her, she might find something to cling to, amid the wreck of happiness which his dispassionate gaze foresaw that she would one day achieve out of her life.

He had run the risk which all who would fain help others must be content to run—the risk that their work will be thrown away. He saw that the little rock-pool which reflected his own face was shallow, but he had not gauged the measure of its shallowness. His deep enthusiasms, tried and tempered before she was born, weary now with his own weariness, aroused hers as the Atlantic wave, sweeping up the rocks, just reaches and arouses the rock-pool, and sends a flight of ripples over it, which, if you look very close, break in mimic waves against the further edge. And before the thunder of the wave is silent the pool is glass once more.

On natures like these the only influence which can make any impression is a personal one. It is overwhelming while it lasts; but it is the teacher who is everything—the teaching is nothing. And when he is removed, they passively drift under another personal influence, as under another wave, and the work of the first, the foundation patiently and lovingly built in its pretty yellow sand, is swept away, or remains in futile fragments, as a mark of the folly of one who built on sand.

Certain strong, abiding principles Mr. Loftus had sought to instil into Sibyl's mind. She had perceived their truth and beauty; but she cared nothing for them in reality, and had fallen at the feet of the man who had awakened those exquisite feelings in her.

And now either she would not, or could not, get up. She clung to her imaginary passion with all the obstinacy which is inherent in weak natures. The disappointment had undermined her delicately-poised health. As she walked down towards the Spey alone on this particular June afternoon, she looked more fragile and ethereal than ever. The faint colour had gone from her cheek, and with it half her evanescent prettiness had departed. Her slight, willowy figure seemed to have no substance beneath the many folds of white material in which her despairing dressmaker had draped her. With the suicidal recklessness of youth, she made no attempt to turn her mind to other thoughts, but pondered instead upon her trouble, with the unreasoning rebellion against it with which, in early life, we all meet these friends in disguise.

She picked her way down the steep hillside, through the wakened broom and sleeping heather, and along the edge of the little oasis of oatfield, where so many thousands of round, river-worn stones had been gleaned into heaps, and where so many thousands still remained among the springing corn. The long labour and the patience and the partial failure which that little field meant, reclaimed from the heather, but not wholly reclaimed from the stones, had often touched Lady Pierpoint, who knew what labour was; but it did not appeal to Sibyl.

She sat down with a sigh on the river-bank, a forlorn white blot against the crowded world of green, with Crack, her little Scotch terrier, beside her, and looked listlessly across the sliding water, which ran deep and brown as Crack's brown eyes, and loitered shallow and yellow as a yellow sapphire among its clean gray stones and gleaming rocks. A pair of oyster-catchers sped upstream, low over the water, swift as eye could follow, with glad cries, like disembodied spirits that have found wings at last and feel the first rapture of proving them.

'Happy birds!' said Sibyl to herself. 'They do not know what trouble means.'

Crack, who had heard this sentiment, or something very like it, before, stretched himself methodically, both front-legs together first, and then the hind-legs one by one, and walked slowly down to the edge of the water and sniffed sadly, as one who knows that search is vain among the stones for a rat which is not there. Crack had a fixed melancholy which nothing could dispel. His early life had been passed in the activity of a camp, and his spirit seemed to have been permanently embittered by the close contemplation of military character. He had been round the world. He knew the principal smells of our Eastern empire, but no reminiscences of his many travels served to brighten the gloomy tenor of his thoughts. He was sad, disillusioned, still apt to hurry and shorten himself through doors, and to retreat under sofas to brood over imaginary wrongs. All games distressed him. He went indoors at once when the red ball was produced which transformed Peter from an elegant poodle into a bounding demon. But in spite of his melancholy he was liked. He went out but little, but where he went he was welcomed. He was a gentleman and a man of the world. No dog ever quarrelled with him. He met bristling overtures with a mournful tact which turned growls into waggings of tails. He himself was seldom seen to wag his tail, except in his sleep.

He returned from the water's edge and sat down on an outlying fold of Sibyl's gown.

In the sunny stillness a wild-duck, with cautious, advanced neck, and a little fleet of water-babies, paddled past, bobbing on the amber shallows. Crack raised his ears and watched them. His feelings were so entirely under control that he could scratch himself while observing an object of interest; and he did so now. But he did not move from his seat on Sibyl's gown. He was disillusioned about wild-ducks, who did not play fair and stick to one element, but would take to their wings when hard pressed in the water, like a woman who changes her ground when cornered in argument.

Presently the afternoon sun shifted, and all the larches on the steep hillside opposite and all the broom along the bank stooped to gaze at a flickering fairyland of broom and larches in the wide water. The deep valley of the river was drowned in light. Only the bank on which Sibyl was sitting under the mountain-ash had fallen suddenly into shadow.

'Like my life,' she thought, and rose to go.

Who was this coming slowly towards her along the little path by the water's edge?

She stood still, trembling, her hands pressed against her breast.

It was he. It was Mr. Loftus. He was looking for her. He was coming to her. Joy and terror seized her.

He saw her standing motionless in her white gown under the white blossom-laden tree. And as he drew near and took her nerveless hands in silence, and looked into her face, he saw again in her deep eyes the shy, imploring glance which had met him once before—the mute entreaty of love to be suffered to live.

'Sibyl,' he said, and in his voice there was reverence as well as tenderness—reverence for her untarnished youth, and tenderness for the white flower of love which it had put forth, 'will you be my wife?'