"That will be a dress to-morrow or the next day," said Eloise. "You will laugh when you see it, it will be so beautiful. And I have packed a basket for our picnic. Wait!" She ran from the room, and I waited. Looking back, now, one of my pleasantest recollections is how she took my money, took the new life I had given her, thanking me indeed, full of gratitude, but as a thing quite natural and between friends. If we had wandered out of the gardens of Lichtenberg together, children, hand in hand, and passed straight through the years as one passes through a moment of time, to find ourselves at Etiolles still hand in hand, our relationship--as regards money affairs--could not have been less unstrained. I had bonbons; she had none; I shared with her. Nothing could be more natural. She returned with the basket packed, and her hat, which she put on before the mirror. Then we started on our picnic in the woods, I carrying the basket. "What part of the woods are you going to?" inquired Madame Ancelot as we crossed the drawbridge. "The grand pool," replied I, "if it is still there, and I can find it." Then, a footstep, and the world of the woods surrounded us, its silence and its music. The place was full of leaping lights and liquid shadows. Here, where the trees were not so dense, the sunlight came through the waving branches in dazzling, quivering shafts; twilit alleys led the eye to open spaces, golden glimmers, and the misty white of the hawthorn trees. The place was a treasure-house of beauty, and we trampled the violets under foot. "Run!" cried Eloise. I chased her, lost her, found her again. I forgot my lameness, I forgot my guardian, the convenances, and the fact that I was come to man's estate and carrying a heavy basket. The trees echoed with our laughter, till, tired out, panting, flushed, with her hat flung back and held to her neck only by the ribbon, Eloise sat down on a little carpet of violets and folded her hands in her lap. "Listen!" said she, casting her eyes up to the trembling leaves above. A squirrel, clinging to the bark of a tree near by, watched us with his bright eyes. "Chuck, chuck." A bird on a branch overhead broke the silence, and, with a flutter of his wings, was gone. And now from far away, like the voice of Summer herself, filled with unutterable drowsiness and laziness and content, came the wood-dove's song to the mysterious Susie: "Don't _cry_ so, Susie--don't _cry_ so, Susie--don't _cry_ so, Susie. _Don't!_" "And listen!" said Eloise, when the wood-dove's song had been wiped away by silence and replaced by a "tap, tap, tap," far off, reiterated and decided, curiously contrasting with the less businesslike sounds of the wood. "That's a woodpecker," I said. "Isn't he going it? And listen! That's a jay."