Five minutes after this casual survey was made his bedroom was
empty, and its occupant had vanished quietly from the house.

At the end of two hours he was again in the room, looking warm and
glowing. He now pursued the artistic details of dressing, which
on his first rising had been entirely omitted. And a very
blooming boy he looked, after that mysterious morning scamper.
His mouth was a triumph of its class. It was the cleanly-cut,
piquantly pursed-up mouth of William Pitt, as represented in the
well or little known bust by Nollekens--a mouth which is in itself
a young man's fortune, if properly exercised. His round chin,
where its upper part turned inward, still continued its perfect
and full curve, seeming to press in to a point the bottom of his
nether lip at their place of junction.

Once he murmured the name of Elfride. Ah, there she was! On the
lawn in a plain dress, without hat or bonnet, running with a boy's
velocity, superadded to a girl's lightness, after a tame rabbit
she was endeavouring to capture, her strategic intonations of
coaxing words alternating with desperate rushes so much out of
keeping with them, that the hollowness of such expressions was but
too evident to her pet, who darted and dodged in carefully timed
counterpart.

The scene down there was altogether different from that of the
hills. A thicket of shrubs and trees enclosed the favoured spot
from the wilderness without; even at this time of the year the
grass was luxuriant there. No wind blew inside the protecting
belt of evergreens, wasting its force upon the higher and stronger