They landed at Pangbourne Woods by the wide grassy path between the reedy river and the spreading beeches. There a man was boiling a kettle. He spoke to them; he instructed them in the life of camping out, and he invited them to tea. Lizzie went into the tent and got out the tea-things. Two men came up, jolly fellows enough; and such little adventures endeared and memorised the day. They climbed, oh! what a climb it was, Lizzie's ankles and courage giving way alternately; but at last they reached a pathway, and they walked at ease into the green solitudes of the wood. It seemed endless, so soft and so still. He spoke to Lizzie, whom he now called Liz, of her past, of the reasons that had led her to leave home and “go to business.” Her brother, she said, was a painter, a celebrated bird-painter. “Then we should know each other, I am a painter.” He told her of his ideas and projects, of how he had been to France; he might go there again, unless something happened to keep him in England. He wrote a little too, in the papers, and he might do something to help her brother--a paragraph in _Fashion_, he could get one in. For fear of wounding her he did not ask if her brother was a decorative painter, employed by a firm, or an artist who exhibited pictures. Her father had married again. She did not like her stepmother, and that had determined her to go into business. Had she ever been in love? Yes, she supposed she had; but it was all over now. The last words sounded, and died away in a great abyss of soul. Parts of the path were marked “Dangerous.” The earth had given way, creating fearful chasms, over which trees leaned dangerously or hung out fantastically by a few roots. In the dell below there stood a small green painted table, and the young people leaning on the protecting railing wondered at this mysterious piece of furniture. There was in them and about them an illusive sense of death and the beauty of life. One slight push would hurl them headlong hundreds of feet down to the painted table. The silver of the river sparkled through silence and the foliage of June, and the songs of the boatmen came and went like voices in a dream. The days of youth are long, and in tender idleness the hours lingered, their charm unbroken in the rattle of London; and happy with love and tired with the great air of the river and its leafy scenery, Frank fell asleep that night. VII One of the French artists he had met in Rome wrote to him from Paris. Why should he not go there? There was nothing for him to do in London; Lizzie Baker had disappeared, and in the year and a half that he spent in Paris learning to draw he forgot her and his friends in Southwick. Nor did he remember them when he returned to London; not until one evening, strolling down Regent Street, he came upon Willy Brookes suddenly. “How do you do, my dear Willy? I haven't seen you for--for--how long?”