"Well," Mavis dragged him into the radiant moonlight and surveyed him critically, "it doesn't matter. I like you in this suit of clothes. You look so tall and straight and slim, and----" "Oh, my dear," Gerald laughed, "you will make me vain." "But you are vain already," she said naively. "Bellaria says that all young men are vain." "How can this particular young man be otherwise," questioned the lover, "when the most charming girl in the world makes an appointment with him in the realms of romance?" "Am I charming, Gerald; am I? Oh," Mavis clapped her hands, "how delightful to be told that. Say it again." "You are charming, Mavis, and also rather reckless for laughing so loud." "Pooh! Everything is safe, for the gates are locked and Bellaria is asleep. In all these wide gardens only you and I are awake, unless," added Mavis seriously, "you count the fairies." "And the nightingales, and the crickets," ended Gerald, smiling. Mavis smiled also, and they stood hand in hand like a couple of schoolchildren out on a frolic. Then "Come," she cried, loosening her grip, "you must catch me, catch me, my Prince;" and like an arrow from the bow she shot across the turf towards the archway, followed rapidly by her lover. Haskins was swift of foot, but Mavis ran like Atalanta, and was flitting about the gardens on the other side of the archway before he could range alongside. "You are the Fairy Queen," panted Gerald, when he reached her. "I saw you spread large white wings." "Oh no," said Mavis seriously and prosaically, "I used my legs." "The Queen of Spain has no legs," quoted Haskins, laughing. "Oh, how dreadful--how very, very dreadful!" And he laughed again to see that she took him seriously. The gardens were very lovely, and much less orderly than the quadrangle. Following Disraeli's dictum, they had been cultivated to excess, and then Nature had been allowed to decivilize them. The result was charming, and wonderfully artistic. There were beds of brilliant flowers, wherein slim saplings grew at will; statues of god and goddess wreathed in greenery; ponds of placid water rimmed with stone, wherein white lilies slept on broad leaves, floating amidst slender reeds. The façade of the house, with its Tudor battlements and long ranges of latticed windows, rose picturesquely in the still, calm light of the moon, which rendered all things ethereal and fairylike. Before the mansion stretched a shallow terrace of gray stone, diapered with lichens and emerald moss. A wide flight of steps descended from this to meet a broad path, which melted imperceptibly into a jungle of tall bushes and wiry grasses. And all around the trees sprang like sentinels to guard this magic domain from the prose of the outside world. Everything was bathed in a luminous white radiance--and in this colorless world Mavis flitted here and there like a moth of snow.