She sat down upon a rock covered with scarlet woodbine, and allowed the tears that were swelling up from her heart to flow softly as the dew is shaken from a flower. It was pleasant to see deep feelings melt away in tears, to that gentle and sweet serenity which soon fell upon the child. Isabel could not entirely comprehend this almost divine feeling, but she respected it and sat down in silence, with an arm around her friend, sorry that she had no power to share all her joy in its fullness. Thus, for a long time, they sat together in dreamy silence, with the spring murmuring behind them, and a carpet of brake leaves, touched with white by the frost, scattering its new-born perfume around their feet. It was a touching picture, those two girls so loving and yet so unlike, the one so wonderfully beautiful, the other awaking a deeper interest with her soul beauty alone. They arose together and walked quietly to the woods. Once within its gorgeous shades, all their cheerfulness came back, and the squirrels that peeped at them through the branches, and rattled nuts over their heads from the yawning chestnut buds, were not more full of simple enjoyment than they were. A light wind had followed the frost, and all the mossy turf was carpeted with leaves crimson, green, russet and gold. Sometimes a commingling of all these colors might be found on one leaf; sometimes, as they looked upward, the great branches of an oak stooped over their heads, heavy with leaves of the deepest green, fringed and matted with blood-red, as if the great heart of the tree were broken and bleeding to death, through all the veins of its foliage. Again the maple trees shook their golden boughs above them, as if they had been hoarding up sunshine for months, and poured it in one rich deluge over their billowy and restless leaves. They wandered on, picking up leaves with far more interest than they had ever felt in searching for wild flowers. It was wonderful, the infinite variety that they found. Now, Isabel would hold up a crimson leaf, clouded with pink and veined with a brown so deep that it looked almost black; again, she would hoard up a windfall from the gum tree, shaped like a slender arrow-head, and with its glossy crimson so thickly covered with tiny dark spots, that it seemed mottled with gems; again, it would be an ash leaf, long, slender and of a pale straw color, or a tuft of wood-moss, that contrasted its delicate green with all this gorgeousness so strongly, that they could not help but gather it. Thus, filled with admiration of each leaf as it presented itself, they wandered on overclouded with the same foliage in gorgeous masses. The sunbeams came shining through it in a rich haze, as if the branches were only throwing off their natural light, and the very wind as it stirred the woods seemed sluggish with healthy scents flung off by the dying undergrowth.