‘If you don’t begin to read this instant,’ whispered Daphne, with her rosy lips close to Edgar’s ear, ‘I shall be made the text of one of Aunt Rhoda’s homilies.’ Edgar took the hint, and plunged anyhow and anywhere into the pages of Browning. They lived all day in the woods, taking their luncheon picnic fashion under the pine-trees. The two young men catered, and fetched and carried for them, assisted by Mowser. They brought cold fowls, and sliced Strasbourg ham, and salad, fruit and cake, a bottle of Bordeaux, and another of a Swiss white wine, which was rather like a weak imitation of Devonshire perry. But such a meal, spread upon a snow-white tablecloth under pine-trees, over whose dark feathery tops gleam the blue bright summer heaven, is about the most enjoyable banquet possible for youthful revellers. Even Aunt Rhoda admitted that it was an agreeable change from the home comforts of Arden Rectory. ‘I hope my dear Rector is being taken care of,’ she murmured plaintively, when she had dulled the edge of an appetite sharpened by that clear air. ‘I hope you will all do justice to the chickens,’ said Gerald, looking across at Daphne, who sat by Edgar’s side in a thoroughly Darby and Joanish manner. ‘I remember once being at a picnic in a forest where an elderly fowl was made quite a feature of. My hostess fancied I was desperately hungry, and was quite distressed at my avoidance of the ancient bird.’ Daphne’s eyes were on her plate, but a slow smile crept over her face in spite of herself. She and Gerald had scarcely looked at each other in all those days among the pine-trees. They had lived in daily intercourse, and yet contrived to dwell as completely apart as if the lake had flowed between them; as if he, like St. Preux, had gazed across the blue waters to catch the glimmer of his beloved’s casement, and she, like Julie, had pined in the home that was desolate without love’s fatal presence. It was hardly possible for resolve to have been firmer than Daphne’s had been since that night at Fribourg. It was hardly possible for an honest purpose to have been more honestly fulfilled. Mowser, waiting upon the picnickers, saw that significant look of Gerald’s, and Daphne’s answering smile; just as she had seen many things at South Hill and elsewhere which only her observant eyes had noted. ‘Still at your old tricks, my young lady,’ she said to herself; ‘but Jane Mowser has got an eye upon you, and your mockinventions shan’t succeed, if Mowser’s faithful service can circum-prevent you.’