The gnarled and time-worn trunks of the old apple-trees, each looking as if it had lingered there, full of remote memories, from an age coeval with the age of those very druids whose sacred mistletoe still clung in patches to their boughs, formed a strange fantastic array of twisted and distorted natural pillars, upon which the foliage, meeting everywhere above their heads, leaned in shadowy security, like the roof of a heathen temple. The buttercups and cuckoo-flowers, which, here and there, sprinkled the heavy grass, were different from those in the open meadows. The golden hue of the one, and the lavender tint of the other, took on, in this diurnal gloom, a chilly and tender pallour, both colours approximating to white. The grey lichen hung down in loose festoons from the higher portions of the knotted trunks, and crept, thick and close, round the moss at their roots. There could hardly be conceived a spot more suggestive of absolute and eternal security than this Hesperidean enclosure. The very fact of the remote but constant presence of humanity there, as a vague dreamy background of immemorial tending, increased this sense. One felt that the easy invasions of grafting-time and gathering-time, returning perennially in their seasons, only intensified the long delicious solitudes of the intervals between, when, in rich, hushed languor, the blossoms bud and bloom and fall; and the fruit ripens and sweetens; and the leaves flutter down. That exquisite seductive charm, the charm of places full of quietness, yet bordering on the edge of the days’ labour, hung like a heavy atmosphere of contentment over the shadowy aisles of this temple of peace. The wood-pigeons keep up a perpetual murmur, all the summer long, in these untrodden spots. No eyes see them. It is as though they never saw one another. But their drowsy liturgical repetitions answer and answer again, as if from the unfathomable depths of some dim green underworld, worshipping the gods of silence with sounds that give silence itself a richer, a fuller weight. “There they are!” cried Gladys suddenly, as the figures of the Andersen brothers made themselves visible on the further side of the orchard. The girls advanced to meet them through the thick grass, swinging their summer-hats in their hands and bending their heads, now and then, to avoid the overhanging boughs. The meeting between these four persons would have made a pleasant and appropriate subject for one of those richly-coloured old-fashioned prints which one sometimes observes in early Victorian parlours. Gladys grew quite pale with excitement, and her voice assumed a vibrant tenderness when she accosted Luke, which made Lacrima give a little start of surprise, as she shook hands with the elder brother. Had her persecutor then, got, after all, some living tissue in the place where the heart beat?