There was a narrow space clear of wood, where a green footpath little used went by, and a large, gnarled, crooked-grown ash-stole opposite, forming a natural arm-chair, well lined with soft dry moss, and canopied overhead with leafy branches, drooping woodbine, and climbing briar, whose roses would soon bloom. The brake fern, young yet and tender, rose up and gave itself for her footstool--for Margaret sat there, leaning back luxuriously in her woodland throne. He thought she must have heard the rustling of the boughs he had parted, and kept still as an Indian hunter, holding his breath for fear lest she should see him thus spying. A minute passed, and there was no motion; then he saw that her right arm hung down listlessly--that the head leaned a little to one side, the face rather away from him--that her hat had evidently dropped from her hand, and an open book had fallen at her feet. She was slumbering. His chest pressed on the green fern, bluebells hung over his feet. "Coo-coo-oo!" the dove with burnished neck called gently to his mate, sitting on the ivied tree. "Jug-jug-jug!" sang the nightingale hard by in the hawthorn--the nightingale that by night is sad, but whose heart is full of joy in the morning. The goldfinches swept by overhead with a gleam of colour from their wings, coquetting on their way to the apple-trees. The sun looked on the world with glorious eye. A ray, warm, but yet not fiercely so, fell aslant between the leaves of the great oak boughs above, and lit up one delicate ear--small, white, with pink within, as in the shell the cameo-cutter graves with his tool; or rather, pink like the apple-bloom, that loveliest of flowers--for as a blossom it peeped forth beneath her brown wavy hair. Her lips were slightly parted: "Thy teeth are like a flock of sheep that are even shorn, which came up from the washing." For their backs are level and white, and glisten with the water. The highly-arched eyebrows did not meet above the straight nose, but left a space there. In some old magic-book he had read that this space was the peculiar precinct of the Queen of Love. A briar had jealously snatched at the loose sleeve of the right arm, which hung down, baring the wrist--a round, soft, white arm, veined with blue, an exquisite polish on the skin. The fingers were long and slightly rosy; from them a few flowers had dropped on the open page of the book.