close our eyes, and yet dimly recognize a golden light bathing the
drowsy lids; and athwart that light images come and go like dreams,
though we know that we are not dreaming.



CHAPTER V.

FROM this state, half comatose, half unconscious, Kenelm was roused
slowly, reluctantly. Something struck softly on his cheek,--again a
little less softly; he opened his eyes, they fell first upon two tiny
rosebuds, which, on striking his face, had fallen on his breast; and
then looking up, he saw before him, in an opening of the trellised
circle, a female child's laughing face. Her hand was still uplifted
charged with another rosebud, but behind the child's figure, looking
over her shoulder and holding back the menacing arm, was a face as
innocent but lovelier far,--the face of a girl in her first youth,
framed round with the blossoms that festooned the trellise. How the
face became the flowers! It seemed the fairy spirit of them.

Kenelm started and rose to his feet. The child, the one whom he had
so ungallantly escaped from ran towards him through a wicket in the
circle. Her companion disappeared.

"Is it you?" said Kenelm to the child, "you who pelted me so cruelly?
Ungrateful creature! Did I not give you the best strawberries in the
dish and all my own cream?"

"But why did you run away and hide yourself when you ought to be
dancing with me?" replied the young lady, evading, with the instinct