"Would he hurt my doe if he came here?" asked Darrell.

"Oh, no!" cried Sophy; "he never hurts anything. He once found a wounded
hare, and he brought it in his mouth to us so tenderly, and seemed so
anxious that we should cure it, which grandfather did, and the hare would
sometimes hurt him, but he never hurt the hare."

Said George sonorously:

"Ingenuas didicisse fideliter artes
Emollit mores, nec sinit esse feros."

Darrell drew Sophy's arm into his own. "Will you walk back to the lake
with me," said he, "and help me to feed the swans? George, send your
servant express for Sir Isaac. I am impatient to make his acquaintance."

Sophy's hand involuntarily pressed Darrell's arm. She looked up into his
face with innocent, joyous gratitude; feeling at once, and as by magic,
that her awe of him was gone.

Darrell and Sophy rambled thus together for more than an hour. He sought
to draw out her mind, unaware to herself; he succeeded. He was struck
with a certain simple poetry of thought which pervaded her ideas--not
artificial sentimentality, but a natural tendency to detect in all life a
something of delicate or beautiful which lies hid from the ordinary
sense. He found, thanks to Lady Montfort, that, though far from learned,
she was more acquainted with literature than he had supposed. And
sometimes he changed colour, or breathed his short quick sigh, when he
recognised her familiarity with passages in his favourite authors which