She seated herself on the trunk, looking like the embodied spirit of the pinewood in her white gown. Nero stood for a few minutes watching me as I sat down beside her, then slouched up and lay down at his mistress’ feet, one eye fixed on me. Evidently this proceeding was new to him. The botanists and gentlemen of the hammer did _not_ care to sit on felled trunks and talk with the daughter of the house. “I said that,” she went on, “because it was just as if you knew how treasonable my thoughts have been lately. I have actually been wishing to travel, and see the world!” I asked her what treason there was in that. “Such an idea, in me, is treason itself!” she said, almost indignantly—“when my father despises the world, and would rather anything should happen than that I should go beyond the Pinewood.” Then I was amazed by the disclosure that this sweet young creature had lived all her life shut up in the Pinewood, almost as much a prisoner as a princess in a fairy-tale immured in a high tower. Her only companions and friends had been her nurses, the clergyman and his wife, and her cousin Roderick, the fair young man with a sneer whose portrait I had said to be unlike the Pyms. Without governesses or tutors, Lilia has managed to learn a great deal. Latin and Greek are not dead languages to her, and she and her father chatter away in Italian like natives. But in the ordinary affairs of life, poor dear child, how ignorant she is! Sitting there with myself, still almost an absolute stranger, she spoke out her heart as if I were a dear old friend returned after a long separation, and actually asked my advice. Mine! It seemed that she had mentioned this desire to see other places to her cousin Roderick, who was a favourite nephew of her father’s, although he would not have anything to do with his family. She and this Roderick had been brought up together like brother and sister playing and sympathising and bickering in the usual fashion. Only when she had confided her treasonable ideas to him had he shocked her by a supplementary suggestion, which seemed to have made a terrible impression upon her. “We have quarrelled, and never, never can be the same again,” she told me in much agitation. “My father does not know it, and has asked Roderick to dinner to meet you. What _shall_ I do?” She was quite tragic. I could hardly help smiling. But seeing how sensitive she was—a natural sensibility greatly increased by a life of unnatural seclusion—I repressed a smile, and said: “See your cousin before dinner, and ‘make it up,’ as the children say.” “Oh, I _couldn’t!_” she said, in distress. “He won’t make it up.” “Then you have tried him?” She nodded. “It has been a dreadful shock to me,” she said. “If you knew, you would understand.” After a little coaxing, she spoke, or rather blurted out: “If you _must_ know—he actually—asked me—to marry him!”