Franceline watched them lifting their wet mouths, all dripping, from the pool, and felt as if she had been drinking too. There was a long, solemn pause, and then a sound like the blast of an organ rose up from the pond, swelling and sweeping over the fields; before it died away a calf in a distant paddock answered it. If any one had told Franceline, as she sat on her stile, thinking sweet, nothing-at-all thoughts, under the sycamore tree, that she was communing with nature, she would have opened her dark eyes at them, and laughed. It was true, nevertheless. She might not know it, but she drew a great deal of her happiness from the woods and fields, and the birds and the sunsets. Her life had been from its babyhood, comparatively speaking, a solitary one, and the want, or rather the absence, of kindred companions had driven her unconsciously into companionship with nature. Her father’s society was a melancholy one enough for a young girl. Raymond’s mind was like an æolian harp set up in a ruin; every breath of wind that swept over it drew out sounds of sweet but mournful music. Even his cheerfulness--and it was uniform and genuine--had a note of sadness in it, like a lively air set in a minor key; there was nothing morbid or harsh in his spirit, but it was entirely out of tune with youth. He was perfectly resigned to life, but the spring was broken; he looked on at Franceline’s young gayety, as he might do at the flutterings and soarings of her doves, with infinite admiration, but without the faintest response within himself. So the child grew up as much alone as a bird might be with creatures of a different nature, and made herself a little world of her own--not a dream world, in the sense of ordinary romance; she had read no novels and knew nothing about the great problem of the human heart, except what its own promptings may have whispered to her. She made friends with the flowers and the birds and the woods, and loved them as if they were living companions. She watched their comings and goings, and found out their secrets, and got into a way of talking to them and telling them hers. As a child, the first peep of the snowdrop and the first call of the cuckoo was as exciting an event to her as the arrival of a new toy or a new dress to other little girls. She found S. Francis of Assisi’s beautiful hymn to his “brother, the sun, and his sisters, the moon and the stars,” one day in an old book of her father’s, and she learned it by heart, and would warble it in a duet with the nightingale out of her lattice-window sometimes when Angélique fancied her fast asleep. As she grew up the mystery of the poem grew clearer to her, and she repeated it with a deeper sense of sympathy with the brothers and sisters that dwell in the sky, and the clear, pure water, and everywhere in the beautiful creation. I am sorry if this sounds unnatural, but I cannot help it. I am describing Franceline as I knew her.