By every token of a healthy youth and a glorious March morning, Johnnie's thoughts should have been light, fanciful, and centred round the fair image of Mistress Dorothy Dawe. Alas! they were dark as a midwinter night, and as gloomy as a funeral oration. "'She only drove me to despair, When--she--un-kind--did--prove.'" Johnnie hummed the last few bars of a popular madrigal in slow and dirge-like tones. "She" was still wayward and unkind, and "He" was setting out on the morrow in search of treasure to lay at a maiden's feet. The young fellow's visions of the Indies were no longer rosy, but drab as November skies. He was pledged to set his face westward ho! but the zest was gone out of the enterprise. He leaned over a gate, and watched the gulls fishing in the river. Johnnie did not hear a light step coming down the meadow towards him; no sound disturbed his melancholy reflections. "Jack!" murmured a soft voice. The young man started as though an arrow had struck him. His face flushed hotly, and a gleam of pleasure lighted up its gloom. "Good morrow, Mistress Dorothy," he said. "I suppose thy father waits at the house? I will go to him at once." He turned from the stile; but on his arm there was the flutter of a hand like to the flutter of a bird's wing, and he stopped. He turned to look at the river again, and the maiden's eyes followed his. There was silence whilst a man might have told ten score. "The wings of the gulls flash like silver in the sunshine," ventured Dorothy. "So I have thought." A pause. "Thou art leaving us to-morrow." "That is why I have been watching the gulls for near an hour." "I don't understand." "Paignton Rob says that these white gulls are found all the world over. I shall see them a thousand leagues away--screaming round the ship; massing in white armies on the New World cliffs; fishing in the rivers. My last vision of home must have white gulls in it. Away yonder they will be fairy birds to me, calling up pictures of my ancestral homestead along Severn side. The forests there will not recall the forest here. How shall their stifling heat and towering palms, their gaudy birds and flowers, their roaring beasts and loathly reptiles, remind one of the cool, sweet glades, the scented bracken, the gnarled oaks, the leaping deer, and sweet-throated songsters of home? 'Tis the vision of the river, the tide, and the wheeling gulls that I shall see again in the land of 'El Dorado.'" There was a sadness and pathos in the forester's voice that went straight to the heart of the forest maiden. The hand was on his arm again, fluttering, trembling. "I have been very wicked!" The fluty notes of a sweet voice were broken. "Who says so?" demanded Johnnie harshly and loudly. "I do; you do." "I do not!" "But I have hurt you."