decay. Overhead, the tops whence they had fallen, waved in the
wind, as in welcome of the Spring, with that peculiar swinging
motion which made the poets of the sixteenth century call them
"sailing pines." The wind blew cool, but not cold; and was filled
with a delicious odour from the earth, which Sutherland took as a
sign that she was coming alive at last. And the Spring he went out
to meet, met him. For, first, at the foot of a tree, he spied a
tiny primrose, peeping out of its rough, careful leaves; and he
wondered how, by any metamorphosis, such leaves could pass into such
a flower. Had he seen the mother of the next spring-messenger he
was about to meet, the same thought would have returned in another
form. For, next, as he passed on with the primrose in his hand,
thinking it was almost cruel to pluck it, the Spring met him, as if
in her own shape, in the person of Margaret, whom he spied a little
way off, leaning against the stem of a Scotch fir, and looking up to
its top swaying overhead in the first billows of the outburst ocean
of life. He went up to her with some shyness; for the presence of
even a child-maiden was enough to make Sutherland shy--partly from
the fear of startling her shyness, as one feels when drawing near a
couching fawn. But she, when she heard his footsteps, dropped her
eyes slowly from the tree-top, and, as if she were in her own
sanctuary, waited his approach. He said nothing at first, but
offered her, instead of speech, the primrose he had just plucked,
which she received with a smile of the eyes only, and the sweetest
"thank you, sir," he had ever heard. But while she held the
primrose in her hand, her eyes wandered to the book which, according
to his custom, Sutherland had caught up as he left the house. It
was the only well-bound book in his possession; and the eyes of
Margaret, not yet tutored by experience, naturally expected an
entrancing page within such beautiful boards; for the gayest