In a few moments I was within the lodge gates, walking my mare along the gravelled drive, and with the reins on the white curved neck before me, looking up at those lofty pines, whose lonely heads were swinging in the air like floating but fettered islands. My head had begun to feel dizzy with the ever-iterated, slow, half-circular sweep, when, just opposite the lawn stretching from a low wire fence up to the door of the steward’s house, my mare shied, darted to the other side of the road, and flew across the grass. Caught thus lounging on my saddle, I was almost unseated. As soon as I had pulled her up, I turned to see what had startled her, for the impression of a white flash remained upon my mental sensorium. There, leaning on the little gate, looking much diverted, stood the loveliest creature, in a morning dress of white, which the wind was blowing about her like a cloud. She had no hat on, and her hair, as if eager to join in the merriment of the day, was flying like the ribbons of a tattered sail. A humanized Dryad!--one that had been caught young, but in whom the forest-sap still asserted itself in wild affinities with the wind and the swaying branches, and the white clouds careering across! Could it be Clara? How could it be any other than Clara? I rode back. I was a little short-sighted, and had to get pretty near before I could be certain; but she knew me, and waited my approach. When I came near enough to see them, I could not mistake those violet eyes. I was now in my twentieth year, and had never been in love. Whether I now fell in love or not, I leave to my reader. Clara was even more beautiful than her girlish loveliness had promised. ‘An exceeding fair forehead,’ to quote Sir Philip Sidney; eyes of which I have said enough; a nose more delicate than symmetrical; a mouth rather thin-lipped, but well curved; a chin rather small, I confess;--but did any one ever from the most elaborated description acquire even an approximate idea of the face intended? Her person was lithe and graceful; she had good hands and feet; and the fairness of her skin gave her brown hair a duskier look than belonged to itself. Before I was yet near enough to be certain of her, I lifted my hat, and she returned the salutation with an almost familiar nod and smile. ‘I am very sorry,’ she said, speaking first--in her old half-mocking way, ‘that I so nearly cost you your seat.’ ‘It was my own carelessness,’ I returned. ‘Surely I am right in taking you for the lady who allowed me, in old times, to call her Clara? How I could ever have had the presumption I cannot imagine.’ ‘Of course that is a familiarity not to be thought of between full-grown people like us, Mr Cumbermede,’ she rejoined, and her smile became a laugh. ‘Ah, you do recognize me, then?’ I said, thinking her cool, but forgetting the thought the next moment. ‘I guess at you. If you had been dressed as on one occasion, I should not have got so far as that.’