Then came the silence and half-stiffness which is ever apt to follow any long quotation, especially any rare recitation of verse by those who are notoriously indifferent to the charms of rhyme and rhythm, and are of another sex than the listener. It seems to indicate an unusual condition of emotion, to be a sort of barometer of sentiment, and the warning of threatening weather was not unheeded by her; hence her response was somewhat nervous in utterance, and instinctively perverse and contradictory. SHE. "That line, 'The liquid light above the hill,' is very lovely, but I can't see that it's any of it at all like to-night." HE (_stoutly and resentfully_). "Oh, no! not at all! There's the field, all still, and here's Thyme, and Elder, and there are wild Roses!--and see! the moon is coming up--so there's your liquid light." SHE. "Well! Yes, perhaps it is; at any rate it is a lovely night. You've read _Lavengro_? No? Certainly you must have heard of it. The gipsy in it says: 'Life is sweet, brother. There's day and night, brother, both sweet things; sun, moon, and stars, brother, all sweet things; there is likewise a wind on the heath.'" HE (_dubiously_). "That's rather queer poetry, if it is poetry--and you must know I do not like to hear you call me brother." Whereupon I discreetly betrayed my near presence on the piazza, to prove that the field, though still, was not deserted. And soon the twain said they would walk to the club house to view the golf prizes; and they left the Wild Thyme and Elder blossoms white, and turned their backs on the moon, and fell to golf and other eminently unromantic topics, far safer for Midsummer Eve than poesy and other sweet things. [Illustration: Lower Garden at Sylvester Manor.] CHAPTER XIV JOAN SILVER-PIN "Being of many variable colours, and of great beautie, although of evill smell, our gentlewomen doe call them Jone Silver-pin." --JOHN GERARDE, _Herball_, 1596. Garden Poppies were the Joan Silver-pin of Gerarde, stigmatized also by Parkinson as "Jone Silver-pinne, _subauditur_; faire without and foule within." In Elizabeth's day Poppies met universal distrust and aversion, as being the source of the dreaded opium. Spenser called the flower "dead-sleeping" Poppy; Morris "the black heart, amorous Poppy"--which might refer to the black spots in the flower's heart. Clare, in his _Shepherd's Calendar_ also asperses them:-- "Corn-poppies, that in crimson dwell, Called Head-aches from their sickly smell." Forby adds this testimony: "Any one by smelling of it for a very short time may convince himself of the propriety of the name." Some fancied that the dazzle of color caused headaches--that vivid scarlet, so fine a word as well as color that it is annoying to hear the poets change it to crimson. [Illustration: "Black Heart, Amorous Poppies."]