At first, from overmuch inactivity and spiritless brooding, a sort of languor--a trembling of the limbs--oppresses her; but presently, as the cold, crisp air creeps into her young blood, she quickens her steps, and is soon walking with a brisk and healthy motion toward the desired spot. Often her eyes fill with unbidden tears, as many a well-remembered place is passed, and she thinks of a kindly word or a gay jest uttered here by lips now cold and mute. There is a sadness in the wood itself that harmonizes with her thoughts. The bare trees, the fast-decaying leaves beneath her feet, all speak of death and change. Swinburne's exquisite lines rise involuntarily to her mind: "Lo, the summer is dead, the sun is faded, Even like as a leaf the year is withered. All the fruit of the day from all her branches Gathered, neither is any left to gather. All the flowers are dead, the tender blossoms, All are taken away; the season wasted Like an ember among the fallen ashes." Seating herself upon a little grassy mound, with her head thrown back against the trunk of a gnarled but kindly beech, she waits her lover's coming. She is very early, almost by her own calculation half an hour must elapse before he can join her. Satisfied that she cannot see him until then, she is rapidly falling into a gentle doze, when footsteps behind her cause her to start into a sitting posture. "So soon," she says, and, rising, finds herself face to face with--Philip Shadwell. "You see, I have followed you," he says, slowly. He does not offer to shake hands with her; he gives her no greeting; he only stands before her, suffering his eyes to drink in hungrily her saddened but always perfect beauty. "So I see," she answers, quite slowly. "You have been in trouble. You have grown thin," he says, presently, in the same tone. "Yes." She is puzzled, dismayed, at his presence here, feeling an unaccountable repugnance to his society, and a longing for his departure, as she notes his unwonted agitation,--the unknown but evident purpose in his eyes. "When last we met," says Philip, with a visible effort at calmness, and with his great dark, moody eyes bent upon the ground, "you told me you--hated me." "Did I? The last time? How long ago it seems!--years--centuries. Ah!"--clasping her hands in a very ecstasy of regret--"how happy I was then! and yet--I thought myself miserable! That day I spoke to you" (gazing at him as one gazes at something outside and beyond the question altogether), "I absolutely believed I knew what unhappiness meant; and now----" "Yes. You said you hated me," says the young man, still bent upon his own wrongs to the exclusion of all others. He is sorry for her, very sorry; but what is her honest grief for her beloved dead compared with the desperate craving for the unattainable that is consuming him daily,--hourly?