I remember very well one golden summer evening when he and I lay talking under a great oak--he expounding and I plucking at the grass as I listened, or let my mind go free--how, quite suddenly, the mesh he was weaving about my groping mind parted in the midst and showed me for an appreciable moment a possibility of something--it was no more--which he could never have seen. From the dense shade in which we lay there stretched out an avenue of timber trees, whereunder the bracken, breast high, had been cut to make a ride. Upon this bracken, and upon this smooth channel in the midst the late sun streamed toward us, a soft wash of gold. Behind all this the sky, pale to whiteness immediately overhead, deepened to the splendid orange of the sunset. Each tree cast his shadow upon his neighbour, so that only the topmost branches burned in the light. Over and above us floated the drowsy hum of the insect world; rarely we heard the moaning of a wood-dove, more rarely still the stirring of deer hidden in the thicket shade. This was a magical evening, primed with wonders, in the glamour of which Master Harkness could find nothing better for him to rehearse than the progress of his amours with his mother's housemaid. Yet something of the evening glow, something of the opulence of summer smouldered in his words. He painted his mistress with the colour of the sunset, he borrowed of it burnt gold to deck her clay. He hymned the whiteness of her neck, her slender waist, her whispers, the kisses of her mouth. The scamp was luxuriating in his own imaginings or reminiscences, much less of a lover and far more of a rhapsodist than he suspected. As such his pæan of precocious love stirred my senses and fired my imagination, but not in the direction of his own. For the glow which he cast upon his affair was a borrowed one. He had dipped without knowing into the languid glory of the evening, which like a pool of wealth lay ready to my hand also. I gave him faint attention from the first. After he had started my thoughts he might sing rapture after rapture of his young and ardent sense. For me the spirit of a world not his whispered, "_A te convien tenere altro viaggio_," and little as I knew it, in my vague exploration of that scene of beauty, of those scarcely stirring, stilly burning trees, of that shimmering-fronded fern, of that misty splendour, I was hunting for the soul of it all, for the informing spirit of it all. Harkness's erotics gave ardour to my search, but no clew. I lost him, left him behind, and never found him again. He fell into the Garden of Priapus, I doubt. As for me, I believed that I was now looking upon a Dryad. I was looking certainly at a spirit informed. A being, irradiate and quivering with life and joy of life, stood dipt to the breast in the brake; stood so, bathing in the light; stood so, preening herself like a pigeon on the roof-edge, and saw me and took no heed.