So saying, she tossed her light head at herself, and looked round through her flickering cloudlets. What did she see? What made the dark water flame upon the instant with a richer glow than sunset? The delicate cheeks, the fair forehead and neck, even the pearly slope of the shoulders, were flooded with deepest carmine. Her pride fell flat, as the cistus stamen at a touch droops away on the petal. Then she shrank back into a flowering broom, and cowered among the spikelets, and dared not move to wipe away the tears she was so mad with. Oh! the wretched abasement earned by a sweet little bit of vanity! How she hated herself, and the light, and the water, her senseless habit of thinking aloud, above all, her despicable fancy that she was growing—what nonsense!—such a pretty girl! Thenceforth and for ever, she felt quite sure, she never could look in a glass again, unless it were just for a moment, to put her hair to rights, when she got home. “To think of my hair all down my neck, and the way I had turned in the gathers”!—the poor little thing had been making experiments how she would look in a low–necked dress—“Oh! that was the worst thing of all. I might have laughed at it but for that. And now I am sure I can never even peep at his face again. Whatever will he think of me, and what would my papa say”? After crying until she began to laugh, she resolved to go straight home, and confess all her crime to Aunt Eudoxia, John Rosedewʼs maiden sister, who had come to live with him when he lost his wife, three dreary years agone. So Amy rolled up her long hair anyhow, without a bit of pride in it, shrank away and examined herself, to be sure that all was right, and, after one peep, came bravely forth, trying to look as much as possible like her good Aunt Doxy; then she walked at her stateliest, with the basket of strawberries, picked for papa, in one hand, and the other tightly clasped upon the bounding of her heart. But her eyes were glancing right or left, like a fawnʼs when a lion has roared; and even the youngest trees saw quite well that, however rigid with Miss Eudoxia the gliding form might be, it was poised for a dart and a hide behind them at every crossing shadow. But fortune favours the brave. She won her own little sallyport without the rustle of a blackberry–leaf, and thereupon rushed to a hasty and ostrich–like conclusion. She felt quite sure that, after all, none but the waters and winds could tell the tale of her little coquetry. Beyond all doubt, Cradock Nowell was deep in the richest mental metallurgy, tracing the vein of Greek iambics, as he did before his beard grew; and she never, never would call them “stupid iambics” again.