Up a steep cart-track, skirting a hop-garden, where the soaring poles and lofty roof of intertwisted network tell of the faith that the now infant plants, scarcely beginning to clasp their supports, will presently engreen the whole land; then down one of its naked aisles; across two cheerful meadows, where strong lambs are capering among the buttercups; to a gate that gives entrance to a brake, in whose midst an inconspicuous pool half hides itself and its water-hens. Lavinia pauses, with her hand on the top bar, and an expression of doubt in her face. The place looks more solitary than its wont. Will he think that she has betrayed him into an ambush even more dangerous than that of the house--he, between whom and herself, all along climbing upland, and through sunny pasture, the dead Bill and his living kinsmen have seemed almost visibly to walk? “It is scarcely a wood,” she says hesitatingly. “There is not a tree of more than twenty years’ growth, and the nightingales sing so loudly here that they will save us the trouble of talking.” His answer is to give the gate an unsuccessful push. “It is locked.” “That is very unusual,” she answers, for an instant harbouring and at once angrily dismissing from her mind a superstitious idea that the homely obstacle may be Balaam’s winged prohibitory angel in a different dress. “It is almost always open; but nothing is easier than to climb it.” He swings himself obediently over, and stands on the other side to give her his aid. But she motions him away, crying almost repellantly-- “Go on! go on! I do not need any help.” If he receives her into his arms, even in the mechanical and prosaic civility of assisting her to bestride a five-barred gate, she knows that were ten thousand dead Bills and living Ruperts to interpose their pale prohibitions, the inevitable must happen. Lavinia has spoken accurately. The pleasant spot in which their agility has landed her and her companion is not a wood. It is merely one of those low green tangles of hazel and maybush, sapling chestnut, and gnarly willow, whose woof is nowhere too thick to let in a thrifty shower of temperate sunbeams; and through the woof of whose carpet the blue hyacinth dye runs dim and rich. A path not wide enough to admit of any couple save a lover-pair walking abreast, girdles the little sheet of water at quiet play with its dancing flies and leaping fish and placidly oaring moorhens. From the heart of one of those brakes, whose semi-privacy seems to provoke the nightingale to uttermost extremity of song, one is now turning his whole little brown body, dimly seen sitting on a hawthorn bough, into a shout of heavenly self-congratulation upon finding himself in such a beautiful May world, and with a demand for love too exquisitely worded to be denied.