Yet for Barbara the sweet sanctity of the ancient trees had no solace and no shade. She had fled there as to a sanctuary to escape from that most fierce and incomprehensible thing—herself. The desire to be alone had been like the thirst of one in a desert—thirst for quiet waters and the shadow of some great rock. The girl had come to my Lord Gore’s house with the purpose of three years struggling to be matured. Perhaps she was a little mad, even as a mind that has brooded upon one shadowy memory must lose the sane breadth of noonday for the more vivid contrasts of dawn or twilight. The fanatical Spanish blood in her had taken fire and burned those three years in the deeps of her sombre eyes. For she had loved the man—her father—as she had loved no other living thing on earth. The manner of his death still woke a slow, ominous fury in her—a phase that placid natures might have been unable to understand. Yet the Jews of old were true and elemental in their vengeances and in the vengeance of their God. They understood that flame of fire in the heart that consumes even its own substance till the sacrificial victim has been found. Yet here was the bitterness of the thing that she should falter before this very sacrifice. It is so easy to strike when the whole heart is in the blow; so difficult when some trick of lovableness makes the courage waver. If only the man had helped her by being gross, arrogant, or contemptible! Yet he was all that she would not have him be, and all that she, as a woman, would have desired had there been no inevitable tragedy urging her on. His very surface, though she rallied herself with cynical distrust, made her incredulous, even afraid. Often she would fling the very suspicion from her with passionate unbelief. And yet in an hour it would flow back again like dark water into a well. Walking the yew walk in some such mood of doubt and hesitation, she saw a boy’s face looking down at her from overhead—a brown, impudent, snub-nosed face with an intelligent twinkle in the eyes. It was John Gore’s boy, Sparkin, straddling the fork of a yew, the dense vault of foliage overhead casting so deep a shadow that he might have escaped notice like his Majesty in the oak after Worcester fight. Barbara paused and glanced up at him threateningly, angry at the thought that she had been spied upon. “What are you doing there?” “Birds’-nesting,” said the boy, promptly. “You won’t find any eggs this month of the year.” “Oh, sha’n’t I!” “No, the birds are fledged.” “Some of them sit twice,” quoth Sparkin, determined neither to be corrected nor to be crushed, though he had been caught at such a disadvantage.