"Ah!" said Mr. Raleigh, leaping from the other side of the brook to the
mossy trunk, "is it you? I have been seeking you, and what sprite sends
you to me?"

"I thought you were going away," she said, abruptly.

"That is a broken paving-stone," he answered, seating himself beside
her, and throwing his hat on the grass.

"You asked me, yesterday, if I confessed to being a myth," she said,
after a time. "If I should go back to Martinique, I should become one in
your remembrance,--should I not? You would think of me just as you would
have thought of the Dryad yesterday, if she had stepped from the tree
and stepped back again?"

"Are you going to Martinique?" he asked, with a total change of face and
manner.

"I don't know. I am tired of this; and I cannot live on an ice-field. I
had such life at the South! It is 'as if a rose should shut and be a bud
again.' I need my native weather, heat and sea."

"How can you go to Martinique?"

"Oh, I forgot!"

Mr. Raleigh did not reply, and they both sat listening to the faint
night-side noises of the world.

"You are very quiet," he said at last, ceasing to fling waifs upon the