CHAPTER XII.
Upon the sweetest flower of all the field."
We are out in the orchard, Wattie and I, among the unripe apples, that are day by day taking new shades of glossy redness on their fat green sides, and announcing to all whom it may concern that after their beautiful youth of pearly blossom, and the long interval of unlovely brownness and uselessness, they are now rapidly nearing the respectability and accomplished work of fruition. They need not be in such a hurry to ripen; they are better off swinging up there on the bough than chopped into small pieces by the cook's knife, or lost to sight through the agency of my young brothers' vigorous teeth and appetites. We have been pelting each other with them, Paul's little son and I, and now he has fallen fast asleep in my arms, and is far away in the unhaunted dreamland of childhood. Nothing, surely, can be fairer than a very handsome child asleep, and Wattie's face might well linger in the memory of any one who saw him at this moment—people, even, who did not see a resemblance, in every lovely curve and haughty trick of feature, to a stern, proud-faced man, whom no one would ever call comely now, who lost his beauty when he lost all the pleasantnesses of his life, many years ago.
It is four weeks since he went away, four weeks since he took my hand in his, and I left it there because I knew that henceforward I was going to make it my care that I should never see his face again. . . . As our eyes met, how the passion and misery leapt straight from his heart to the brown depths; how I trembled, recognizing clearly enough that George had not warned me too soon, or too urgently. . . . He never said a word beyond good-bye, nor did I—people were all about us—but I saw wild words trembling
