“With a little burst the door flew open and revealed that my visitor was no less and no greater a person than Helen. [Sidenote: Helen.] “Now Helen needs some description, and no better time for giving it could be found than as she stood there at the top of the three or four steps which lead up to my sanctum, her face flushed with her struggle with the door handle. “Helen was a town-bred child of five years old, and the colour gave her usually pale face an added charm. Charm is the right word to use, for, though she did not possess any very great beauty (excepting her large dark eyes and lashes), it was impossible not to fall under her charm. She fascinated by her various moods, often serious almost to melancholy, but suddenly bursting out into utter and abandoned joyousness. She fascinated again by her vivid imagination, by the sensitiveness with which she shrank from an unresponsive look or word, and by the gradual unfolding of her nature to anyone who _understood_. She had come to stay with us in our completely country house, and was entranced with the mystery and delight of all she saw. “On that particular morning she had come to demand that I should fulfil a promise to go out and pick blackberries, for had not I said that I had passed quantities of big ones, all ripe and ready, only the day before? There she stood in her white sun bonnet and her short red flannel jacket, beneath which came the bottom of her white frock and a little pair of legs which country sun and air were already beginning to assimilate to those of our village bairns in colour though not in thickness. “‘Well?’ I said, to which her only reply was to hold up and shake at me an empty basket with which she had provided herself. ‘What’s that for?’ said I. ‘I wonders!’ she answered, using an expression with which we had already become familiar. ‘Well,’ I said, ‘you had better tell me.’ ‘Can’t you guess?’—with some scorn—and then triumphantly, ‘Backberwies, o’ course!’ “There was very little more to be said. Nature might have been resisted alone, but nature _and_ Helen would have proved too much for a stronger and more reluctant man than I. And so it was arranged. Helen was to meet me in the hall in a quarter of an hour, which would give me time to scribble a couple of notes, one (by the way) to the publishers to say that great pressure prevented my finishing the article that day, which was true—in a sense! “I have been many walks with many people, but none that I can compare with the one upon which Helen and I started that sunny September morning. I have walked as an undergraduate with learned dons who discoursed of matters beyond my ken. I have walked with ladies of sentiment, who vainly appealed to my sympathy and imagination. But never till that morning did I walk with a companion who carried me with her into another world and who obtained complete sway over my every thought and action. This did not begin all at once. [Sidenote: Through the Village.]