Short Fiction

the wild steep footway, “I would gladly ask her to return with us, were it not for the recollection of falsehood and misery which her face brings with it.”

Before they reached the hut, however, they were met by Isola’s nephew, the young woodcutter, of whom mention has already been made. He looked grave and sad, and lifting his hat respectfully to Mr. Warden, waited for him to speak.

“How is your aunt this morning, André,” said Amy, “shall we find her within?”

The young man shook his head.

“She is gone, mademoiselle, she will never return. This morning at daybreak the angels carried her soul away. Since mademoiselle left us, she wearied and sickened, she eat nothing, she never slept. There in the window is her lace cushion with the bobbins untouched, and day and night she sat and moaned in her wicker chair. Yesterday, when I tried to make her take some food, she turned her face to the wall, ‘No, no,’ she said, ‘the summer flowers are faded and dead, why should the withered leaf hang upon the bough?’ She never spoke to me afterwards, and this morning, when I went to her room to ask how she was, I found her lying dead and silent on her bed. Will mademoiselle come in and see her as she lies? She looks beautiful with her wreaths and garlands of flowers.”

This, however, Mr. Warden would not permit, for he felt his young daughter had already been tried beyond her strength, and Amy, with the mists of tears hanging over her eyes, looked her last at the Cevenol valley, and said a long farewell to the beautiful solitude.

And so the winter snows and clouds came and went, and the spring sun shone out once more, calling into life and being a thousand sweet sights and sounds. It lighted up the grey house at Harleyford, and fell slantwise through the tall elms on to the tender grass beneath. It shone through the east window of Harleyford Old Church, on to a quiet wedding party assembled there one bright May morning, and played in many coloured beams on two monuments standing side by side in the grassy graveyard.

And far away in the lonely valley of the Cevennes, the same spring sunshine lighted up a quiet weed-grown resting-place, and fell in quivering lines and curves upon a simple wooden cross, engraved in rude peasant’s carving, with these few words⁠—

“Isola.”

“Fidèle jusques à la mort.”

Trooping with Crows

I

In the Nest

Buried among the Welsh mountains it was⁠—an old grey stone two-storied house, running into towers, and odd gables, and queer old-fashioned outbuildings with three-cornered windows and five-cornered doors. “The Eyrie” it was called in the liquid unpronounceable language of the district, and it seemed a not inappropriate title when looked at from the low-lying glen at the foot of the brown rugged mountains which shut in this quiet little homestead. For a homestead it was in every sense of the word; one need but cross the somewhat weedy lawn, where wild birds of all sorts and sizes, and squirrels also, loved to congregate, and enter the drawing-room by one of the long narrow French windows, to find tokens of comfort and refinement and a lady’s ruling hand in every nook and corner. An Erard’s grand piano, a harp, an easel in a good northern light, a sculptured group in pure marble, and a delicately-painted medallion on the walls, were the first things that met the eye. But hidden away in corners were greater treasures still: old and priceless books in the deep shelves of the library, rare prints and engravings in the capacious portfolios, and, hanging on the walls of the large central hall, were pictures which Owen Tremarten had spent a lifetime and a fortune in tracing out and purchasing. This hall was the favourite resort of the master of the house, and here stood in a deep recess his daughter’s favourite instrument, a magnificent deep-toned organ. Hour after hour would he pass here wandering among his pictures and listening to dreamy fugue or sonata, or some wild triumphal march which would come springing from under his daughter’s slight yet firm fingers. Perhaps as he sauntered up and down in the dim twilight or golden summer’s afternoon the bright fresh maiden of eighteen would fade into the image of the girl-mother laid so many years ago in her early grave, and his own romance of love and passion would be lived through once more⁠—who can tell?

But now in this early spring morning the hall stands wide open and empty. Lettice Tremarten has too keen an appreciation of fresh air and sweet sights and sounds not to be among them when they are at their best. Besides, has she not a whole colony of friends and neighbours (feathered and otherwise) dependent upon her? There on the lawn in the very midst of them all she stands⁠—a slight tall figure with a small head crowned with a mass of curly, wavy brown hair⁠—hair which never could be reduced to order and submission, and which had a trick of defying hairpins and ribbons, and would tumble over the girl’s eyes whenever she turned up her face to meet yours, as she was rather fond of doing at times, or it would tumble the other way and hang like a thick veil over neck and shoulders as she stooped to gather the flowers for her fresh morning’s vases, or to feed the fat lazy blackbirds and robins which came trooping and twittering from all corners at her approach.

That is what they are doing at the present moment, and the lawn, kept wild and untrimmed by Miss Lettice’s own orders, “because the squirrels like something rough and tangly under their little toes,” is literally alive with life and sound. The robins have ventured the nearest to her neat little garden-boots, and in close proximity to them balances itself a lame barndoor fowl, whose