“But you will let me do it,” said I, referring to the cauterising. “You make me; but I shall feel—ugh, I daren’t think of it. Get me some of those berries.” I plucked a few bunches of guelder-rose fruits, transparent, ruby berries. She stroked them softly against her lips and cheek, caressing them. Then she murmured to herself: “I have always wanted to put red berries in my hair.” The shawl she had been wearing was thrown across her shoulders, and her head was bare, and her black hair, soft and short and ecstatic, tumbled wildly into loose light curls. She thrust the stalks of the berries under her combs. Her hair was not heavy or long enough to have held them. Then, with the ruby bunches glowing through the black mist of curls, she looked up at me, brightly, with wide eyes. I looked at her, and felt the smile winning into her eyes. Then I turned and dragged a trail of golden-leaved convolvulus from the hedge, and I twisted it into a coronet for her. “There!” said I, “you’re crowned.” She put back her head, and the low laughter shook in her throat. “What!” she asked, putting all the courage and recklessness she had into the question, and in her soul trembling. “Not Chloë, not Bacchante. You have always got your soul in your eyes, such an earnest, troublesome soul.” The laughter faded at once, and her great seriousness looked out again at me, pleading. “You are like Burne-Jones’ damsels. Troublesome shadows are always crowding across your eyes, and you cherish them. You think the flesh of the apple is nothing, nothing. You only care for the eternal pips. Why don’t you snatch your apple and eat it, and throw the core away?” She looked at me sadly, not understanding, but believing that I in my wisdom spoke truth, as she always believed when I lost her in a maze of words. She stooped down, and the chaplet fell from her hair, and only one bunch of berries remained. The ground around us was strewn with the four-lipped burrs of beechnuts, and the quaint little nut-pyramids were scattered among the ruddy fallen leaves. Emily gathered a few nuts. “I love beechnuts,” she said, “but they make me long for my childhood again till I could almost cry out. To go out for beechnuts before breakfast; to thread them for necklaces before supper;—to be the envy of the others at school next day! There was as much pleasure in a beech necklace then as there is in the whole autumn now—and no sadness. There are no more unmixed joys after you have grown up.” She kept her face to the ground as she spoke, and she continued to gather the fruits. “Do you find any with nuts in?” I asked. “Not many—here—here are two, three. You have them. No—I don’t care about them.”