So she kept this one foolish secret locked in her own breast. The passion was not deep enough to make her miserable, or to spoil the unsophisticated joys of her life. Perhaps it was rather fancy than passion. It was fed and fostered by all her dreams. But her life was in no wise unhappy because this love lacked more substantial food than dreaming. God had given her that intense delight in Nature, that love of His beautiful earth, for which Faustus thanked his creator. Field, streamlet, wood, and garden, were sources of inexhaustible pleasure. She loved animals of all kinds. The gray Jersey cows in the marshy water-meadows; the house dogs, and yard dogs, and stable terriers—supposed to be tremendous at rats, yet never causing any perceptible diminution of that prolific race; the big white horses at the farm, with their coarse plebeian tails tied up into tight knots, their manes elaborately plaited, and their harness bedizened with much brazen ornamentation; Madoline’s exquisite pair of dark chestnuts, thoroughbred to the tips of their delicate ears; Sir Vernon’s massive roadster; Boiler and Crock, the old carriage-horses—Daphne had an affection for them all. They were living things, with soft friendly eyes, more unvaryingly kind than human eyes, and they all seemed to love her. She was more at her ease with them than in the dimly-lighted, flower-scented drawing-room, where Sir Vernon always seemed to look at her as if he wished her away, and where her aunt worried her about her want of deportment. With Lina she was always happy. Lina’s love and gentleness never varied. Daphne came home after a morning wasted on the river, to sit at her sister’s feet while she worked, or to lie on the sofa while Lina read to her, glad to get in the thin edge of the educational wedge in the form of an interesting article from one of the Quarterlies, or a few pages of good poetry. Daphne was a fervent lover of verse, so that it came within the limits of her comprehension. Her tastes were catholic; she worshipped Shakespeare; she adored Byron and Shelley and Tennyson, Mrs. Browning, and the simpler poems of Robert Browning; and she had heard vaguely of verses written by a poet called Swinburne; but this was all she had been permitted to learn of the latest development of the lyric muse. Byron and Tennyson, it is needless to say, were her especial favourites. ‘One makes me feel wicked, and the other makes me feel good; but I adore them both,’ she said. ‘I don’t see what you can find in Childe Harold to make you wicked,’ argued Madoline, who had the old-fashioned idea, hereditary of course, that Byron was the poet of the century.