I felt it was unnecessary for me to be seen just then, and I vanished
guiltily round the corner into the West Wood, and so to love-dreams
and single-handed play, wandering along one of those meandering bracken
valleys that varied Bladesover park. And that day and for many days that
kiss upon my lips was a seal, and by night the seed of dreams.

Then I remember an expedition we made--she, I, and her
half-brother--into those West Woods--they two were supposed to be
playing in the shrubbery--and how we were Indians there, and made a
wigwam out of a pile of beech logs, and how we stalked deer, crept near
and watched rabbits feeding in a glade, and almost got a squirrel. It
was play seasoned with plentiful disputing between me and young Garvell,
for each firmly insisted upon the leading roles, and only my wider
reading--I had read ten stories to his one--gave me the ascendency
over him. Also I scored over him by knowing how to find the eagle in a
bracken stem. And somehow--I don't remember what led to it at all--I and
Beatrice, two hot and ruffled creatures, crept in among the tall bracken
and hid from him. The great fronds rose above us, five feet or more, and
as I had learnt how to wriggle through that undergrowth with the minimum
of betrayal by tossing greenery above, I led the way. The ground under
bracken is beautifully clear and faintly scented in warm weather; the
stems come up black and then green; if you crawl flat, it is a tropical
forest in miniature. I led the way and Beatrice crawled behind, and then
as the green of the further glade opened before us, stopped. She crawled
up to me, her hot little face came close to mine; once more she looked
and breathed close to me, and suddenly she flung her arm about my neck
and dragged me to earth beside her, and kissed me and kissed me
again. We kissed, we embraced and kissed again, all without a word; we
desisted, we stared and hesitated--then in a suddenly damped mood and a
little perplexed at ourselves, crawled out, to be presently run down and