FOUR days later she went to walk in Hawthorn Forest. It was a golden afternoon, and she had hastened her work and got it out of hand. The roof was mended, the beehives were back, the cottage taking on an air of having been lived in all this while. Old Heron earned by scrivener’s work. It was not much that he found to do, but it gave them plain fare and plain clothes to wear. Joan, too, from time to time sold to a merchant flax that she had spun.... She had gone no way into the forest since their return, there had been each day so much to do! But to-day an image had haunted her of how the forest used to look in its garb of May. She let the gate-latch fall behind her and went out in the grey-green gown that she had spun and dyed herself. She wore a small cap of linen and a linen kerchief. Sunday she would wear a bluish gown, and a cap and kerchief of lawn. She was tall and light upon her feet, grey-eyed and well-featured, with hair more gold than brown, with a warm, sun-flushed, smooth, fine-textured skin, and a good mouth and chin and throat. The sun was three hours high; she meant to have a long and beautiful time. So close to the forest edge was the cottage that almost immediately great trees were about her, leaf-mould and flowerets beneath her feet. The forest was hardly yet in full leaf. There spread about her a divine pale emerald fretwork, and gold light in lances and arrows, and closing the vistas purple light in gauzy sheets and curtains. The boles of the trees were marvels, the great spreading branches kings’ wonders, every slight fern illustrious. The stir and song of hidden birds, the scurrying of a hare, a glimpse down a beechen aisle of a doe and fawn, filled a cup of delight. She was Greek to it all, a country girl of Attica. Merely to live was good, merely to vibrate and quiver to the myriad straying fingers of life, merely to be, and ever more to be, with a fresh intensity! On she wandered with a light step and heart, now by some handbreadth of sward, now in a maze of trees. Now and then she stood still, gazing and listening and smelling the good earth. Once or twice she rested upon some protruding root or fallen log, nursed her knees and marked the minute life about her. Happy, happy, happy! with the blood coursing warmly and sanely through her veins, with her senses keen at the intake and her brain good at combining.... Open places, small clearings, existed here and there in the forest with, at great intervals, some hut or poor cottage. So it was that she soon came in sight of the burned cot and trodden bit of garden whence Mother Spuraway had plucked the rue.