"You have no right to say such words to me, Julius. I have done all a woman could do to prevent, them. I have never given you any encouragement. A gentleman does not speak without it." "I could not help speaking. I love you, Charlotte. Is there any wrong in loving you? If I had any hope of winning you." "No, no; there is no hope. I do not love you. I never shall love you." "Unless you have some other lover, Charlotte, I shall dare to hope"-- "I have a lover." "Oh!" "And I am frank with you because it is best. I trust you will respect my candor." He only bowed. Indeed, he found speech impossible. Never before had Charlotte looked so lovely and so desirable to him. He felt her positive rejection very keenly. "Sophia is coming. Please to forget that this conversation has ever been." "You are very cruel." "No. I am truly kind. Sophia, I am tired; let us go home." So they turned out of the field, and into the lane. But something was gone, and something had come. Sophia felt the change, and she looked curiously at Julius and Charlotte. Charlotte was calmly mingling the poppies and wheat in her hands. Her face revealed nothing. Julius was a little melancholy. "The fairies have left us," he said. "All of a sudden, the revel is over." Then as they walked slowly homeward, he took Sophia's hand, and swayed it gently to and fro to the old fiddler's refrain,-- "'Little I thought what love could do.'" CHAPTER V. CHARLOTTE. "Oh, how this spring of love resembleth The uncertain glory of an April day!" "Hammering and clinking, chattering stony names Of shale and hornblende, rag and trap and tuff, Amygdaloid and trachyte." When Charlotte again went to Up-Hill she found herself walking through a sober realm of leafless trees. The glory of autumn was gone. The hills, with their circular sheep-pens, were now brown and bare; and the plaided shepherds, descending far apart, gave only an air of loneliness to the landscape. She could see the white line of the stony road with a sad distinctness. It was no longer bordered with creeping vines and patches of murmuring bee-bent heather. And the stream-bed also had lost nearly all its sentinel rushes, and the tall brakens from its shaggy slopes were gone. But Silver Beck still ran musically over tracts of tinkling stones; and, through the chilly air, the lustered black cock was crowing for the gray hen in the hollow.