Never was there such a girl for a walk, Alick Dudley thought, as Bessie Ormson. If she went out in the early morning, before the sun had risen high enough to have much power, Bessie would stop to look at the cobwebs glittering with dew-drops, at the drooping blades of wet grass, at the tears on the leaves of the dog-roses. Were it later in the day, she revelled in the luxurious warmth; in the far-away tiled roofs peeping red from amongst sheltering trees; in the quiet cattle; in the hush of the noon-tide; and when the afternoon stole on, and the evening shadows began to fall, she delighted in the solemn darkness of the distant woods, in the flow of beck and stream, in the figures of the labourers hieing them, home across the field-paths, in the children grouped about the cottage doors. “It is peace,” she was wont to say—“perfect peace. I wonder if heaven will be like this!” There are poets who cannot write a line of verse; there are artists who yet lack the power to reproduce that which fills their souls with pleasure almost amounting to pain. The understanding mind and the skilful hand are not necessarily sent into the world together. The power of appreciating things lovely and beautiful is often divorced from the capacity to create or portray the lovely and the beautiful, or, rather, is not always mated with such capacity; and, although Bessie Ormson possessed no creative or imitative genius, she was yet endowed with that diviner genius—the ability to luxuriate in the thousand works of the great Creator. And it was this faculty of perception and appreciativeness which, added to her quickness and vivacity, made Bessie such good company that no one in the length of a summer’s day could weary of her. Nothing escaped her—not a flower growing by the wayside, not a cloud fleeting across the sky, not a change of expression on a man’s face, not an unusual cadence in a familiar voice. With all her sarcasm and frivolity, the girl’s human sympathy was intense; and, perhaps, when the secret of most popularity is exhausted, it will be found only to exist in the fact that the man or the woman popular can enter into and understand the moods and feelings of other men and women. It was so with Bessie, at all events. She loved Berrie Down Hollow with a love almost amounting to passion. To her, that place was the realization of peace, happiness, home, beauty, contentment; and yet she could comprehend the natural desire of the lad who stood beside her to leave Hertfordshire and go forth to push his way in the world. It was of that desire they had been talking as they sauntered across the fields towards North Kemms.