The hemorrhage of those two young hearts! But, for a time, each plastered the other's wounds with letters--dear letters--letters every post. For the postal authorities made no objection to Narcissus corresponding with two or more maidens at once. And it is only fair to Alice to say, that she knew as little of the Miller's Daughter as the Miller's Daughter knew of her. So, when Narcissus was reciting _Endymion_ to his Miller's Maid, it was not without a minor chord plaining through the major harmonies of the present happiness; the sense that Alice was but fifteen miles away--so near she could almost hear him if he called--only fifteen miles away, and it was a long three months since they had met. It now becomes necessary to admit a prosaic fact hitherto concealed from the Reader. Narcissus rode a bicycle. It was, I must confess, a rather 'modern' thing to do. But surely the flashing airy wheel is the most poetical mode of locomotion yet invented, and one looks more like a fairy prince than ever in knickerbockers. Whenever Narcissus turned his gleaming spokes along some mapped, but none the less mysterious, county--road, he thought of Lohengrin in his barge drawn by white swans to his mystic tryst; he thought of the seven-leagued boots, the flying carpet, the wishing-cap, and the wooden Pegasus,--so called because it mounted into the clouds on the turning of a peg. As he passed along by mead and glade, his wheel sang to him, and he sang to his wheel. It was a daisied, daisied world. There were buttercups and violets in it too as he sped along in the early morning of an unforgotten Easter Sunday, drawn, so he had shamelessly told his Miller's Daughter, by antiquarian passion to visit the famous old parish church near which Alice was at school. Antiquarian passion! Well, certainly it is an antiquarian passion now. But then--how his heart beat! how his eyes shone as with burning kohl! That there was anything to be ashamed of in this stolen ride never even occurred to him. And perhaps there was little wrong in it, after all. Perhaps, when the secrets of all hearts are revealed, it will come out that the Miller's Daughter took the opportunity to meet Narcissus' understudy,--who can tell? But the wonderful fresh morning-scented air was a delicious fact beyond dispute. That was sincere. Ah, there used to be real mornings then!--not merely interrupted nights. And it was the Easter-morning of romance. There was a sweet passionate Sabbath-feeling everywhere. Sabbath-bells, and Sabbath-birds, and Sabbath-flowers. There was even a feeling of restful Sabbath-cheer about the old inn, where, at last, entering with much awe the village where Alice nightly slept--clothed in white samite, mystic, wonderful, --Narcissus provided for the demands of romance by a hearty country breakfast. A manna of blessing seemed to lie thick upon every thing. The very ham and eggs seemed as if they had been blessed by the Pope.