A tree, leafless, but purplish pink with bloom, leaned from the bank above them. He broke a branch and gave it to her. “It is the Judas-tree,” he told her. “Iscariot hanged himself thereon.” Around the trunk of a beech a lizard ran like a green flame, and they heard the distant barking of a fox. Large white butterflies went past them, and a hummingbird whirred into the heart of a wild honeysuckle that had hasted to bloom. “How different from the English forests!” she said. “I could love these best. What are all those broad-leaved plants with the white, waxen flowers?” “May-apples. Some call them mandrakes, but they do not rise shrieking, nor kill the wight that plucks them. Will you have me gather them for you?” “I will not trouble you,” she answered, and presently turned aside to pull them for herself. He looked at the graceful, bending figure and lifted his brows; then, quickening his pace until he was up with the coach, he spoke to the negro upon the box. “Tyre, drive on to that big pine, and wait there for your mistress and me. Sidon,”--to the footman,--“get down and take my horse. If your master wakes, tell him that Mistress Evelyn tired of the coach, and that I am picking her a nosegay.” Tyre and Sidon, Haward’s steed, the four black coach horses, the vermilion-and-cream coach, and the slumbering Colonel, all made a progress of an hundred yards to the pine-tree, where the cortége came to a halt. Mistress Evelyn looked up from the flower-gathering to find the road bare before her, and Haward, sitting upon a log, watching her with something between a smile and a frown. “You think that I, also, weigh true love by the weight of the purse,” he said. “I do not care overmuch for your gold, Evelyn.” She did not answer at once, but stood with her head slightly bent, fingering the waxen flowers with a delicate, lingering touch. Now that there was no longer the noise of the wheels and the horses’ hoofs, the forest stillness, which is composed of sound, made itself felt. The call of birds, the whir of insects, the murmur of the wind in the treetops, low, grave, incessant, and eternal as the sound of the sea, joined themselves to the slow waves of fragrance, the stretch of road whereon nothing moved, the sunlight lying on the earth, and made a spacious quiet. “I think that there is nothing for which you care overmuch,” she said at last. “Not for gold or the lack of it, not for friends or for enemies, not even for yourself.” “I have known you for many years,” he answered. “I have watched you grow from a child into a gracious and beautiful woman. Do you not think that I care for you, Evelyn?”