In less time than it takes to tell it, Kendal had gathered about her heaps of the beautiful, shining leaves.
"Oh, aren't they lovely!" cried Iris, delightedly. "I fairly adore autumn leaves."
"I did not know that you had such an eye for the beautiful in nature," he retorted, rather pleased.
"I adore everything that is handsome," she said, in a low voice, returning his look of a few moments ago with interest.
An hour flew by on golden wings, and the wreaths grew beneath their touch.
"Now you look indeed a queen!" cried Harry, raising one gracefully, and laying it on the girl's dark curls. "You remind me just now of pictures I have seen of Undine and the woodland nymphs."
"Ah! but Undine had no heart," declared Iris.
"In some respects you are like Undine," he retorted. "She never knew she had a heart till she was conscious of its loss. Ah, but you do look bewitching, Miss Vincent—Iris, with that wreath of autumn foliage on your head, like a crown of dying sunset. When I see the leaves turn in the autumn, lines that I read somewhere always recur to me:
"'As bathed in blood the trailing vines appear,
While 'round them, soft and low, the wild wind grieves;
The heart of autumn must have broken here,
And poured her treasure out upon the leaves.'"
"What pretty poetry!" sighed Iris. "Why, it seems to me that you have some beautiful sentiment, set to rhyme, to express almost every thought! You must love poetry. Does—does Dorothy care for it?"