"Good-morning."

"Ah! there you are. Toto—see!"

Eloise, without a hat, working in the little garden of the Pavilion, held up a huge spade for my inspection. The moat divided us, and I had my foot on the drawbridge, preparing to cross.

Up at six, I had come to Evry by an early train, and walked from the station. It was now after ten, and great was the beauty of the morning.

"I have dug up quite a lot," said Eloise. "Look!—all that. Madame Ancelot says I will make a gardener by and by—by and by—by and by," she sang, tossing the spade amidst some weeds; and then, hanging on my arm, she drew me into the house.

A perfume of violets filled the sitting-room. The place was changed. The subtle hand of a woman had rearranged the chairs, looped back the curtains and arranged them in folds of grace, peopled with violets empty bowls, wrought wonders with a touch.

On the sofa lay a heap of white material, which she swept away.

"That will be a dress to-morrow or the next day," said Eloise. "You will laugh when you see it, it will be so beautiful. And I have packed a basket for our picnic. Wait!" She ran from the room, and I waited.

Looking back, now, one of my pleasantest recollections is how she took my money, took the new life I had given her, thanking me indeed, full of gratitude, but as a thing quite natural and between friends. If we had wandered out of the gardens of Lichtenberg together, children, hand in hand, and passed straight through the years as one passes through a moment of time, to find ourselves at Etiolles still hand in hand, our relationship—as regards money affairs—could not have been less unstrained. I had bonbons; she had none; I shared with her. Nothing could be more natural.

She returned with the basket packed, and her hat, which she put on before the mirror. Then we started on our picnic in the woods, I carrying the basket.

"What part of the woods are you going to?" inquired Madame Ancelot as we crossed the drawbridge.

"The grand pool," replied I, "if it is still there, and I can find it."

Then, a footstep, and the world of the woods surrounded us, its silence and its music.

The place was full of leaping lights and liquid shadows. Here, where the trees were not so dense, the sunlight came through the waving branches in dazzling, quivering shafts; twilit alleys led the eye to open spaces, golden glimmers, and the misty white of the hawthorn trees.

The place was a treasure-house of beauty, and we trampled the violets under foot.

"Run!" cried Eloise.

I chased her, lost her, found her again. I forgot my lameness, I forgot my guardian, the convenances, and the fact that I was come to man's estate and carrying a heavy basket. The trees echoed with our laughter, till, tired out, panting, flushed, with her hat flung back and held to her neck only by the ribbon, Eloise sat down on a little carpet of violets and folded her hands in her lap.

"Listen!" said she, casting her eyes up to the trembling leaves above.

A squirrel, clinging to the bark of a tree near by, watched us with his bright eyes.

"Chuck, chuck." A bird on a branch overhead broke the silence, and, with a flutter of his wings, was gone. And now from far away, like the voice of Summer herself, filled with unutterable drowsiness and laziness and content, came the wood-dove's song to the mysterious Susie:

"Don't cry so, Susie—don't cry so, Susie—don't cry so, Susie. Don't!"

"And listen!" said Eloise, when the wood-dove's song had been wiped away by silence and replaced by a "tap, tap, tap," far off, reiterated and decided, curiously contrasting with the less businesslike sounds of the wood.

"That's a woodpecker," I said. "Isn't he going it? And listen! That's a jay."

Then the whole wood sang to the breeze that had suddenly freshened, the light flashed and danced through the dancing leaves, the trees for a moment seemed to shake off the indolence of summer, and the forest of SÉnart spoke—spoke from its cavernous bosom, where the pine-trees spread the hollow ground, from the pools where the bulrushes whispered, from the beech-glades and the nut-groves. The oaks, old as the time of Charles IX., the willows of yesterday, the elms all a-drone with bees, and the poplars paling to the trumpet-call of the wind, all joined their voices in one divine chorus:

"I am the forest of SÉnart, old as the history of France, yet young as the last green leaf that April has pinned to my robe. Rejoice with me, for the skies are blue again, the hawthorn blooms, the birds have found their nests, the old, old world is young once more. For it is May."

"It is May; it is May!" came the carol of the birds, freshening to life with the dying wind.

Then we went on our road, Eloise with her hands filled with freshly gathered violets.

I thought I knew the forest and the direction to take for the great pool; but we had not gone far when our path branched, and for my life I could not tell which to take.

The path to the left being the most alluring, we took it; and lo! before we had gone very far, recollection woke up. This narrow path, twisting, turning, sometimes half obscured by the luxuriance of the undergrowth, was the path I had taken years ago—the path leading by the old-forgotten gravel-pit into which I had fallen, maiming myself for life; the path along which I had followed the mysterious child so like little Carl.

Perhaps it was the old recollection, but the path for me had a sinister appearance; something that was not good hung about it. Unconsciously I quickened my steps. I was walking in front; and as we passed the spot where I had seen the child standing and looking back at me from amidst the bushes, Eloise laid her hand on my arm, as if for closer companionship.

"I do not like it here," said she. "And I saw something—something moving in those bushes."

"Never mind," I replied; "we will soon reach the open."

When we did, and when we found ourselves in a broad drive which I remembered, and which led to the place I wanted, the sweat was thick on my brow; and I determined that, go back how we might, I would never enter that path again. It had for me the charm and yet the horror that we only find associated in dreamland.

"There was a child amidst the bushes," said Eloise. "I just saw its head; and—I don't know why—it frightened me, and——"

"Don't," said I. "I believe that place is haunted. Let us forget it."

The grand pool at last broke before us through the trees—a great space of sapphire-coloured water, where the herons had their home, and the dragon-flies.

It was past noon. We were hungry, so we sat down on a grassy bank by the water, opened the basket, and, spreading the food on the grass between us, fell to.