‘O dear no! The sun cannot harm me. I love him so passionately. O Mr. Jasper! I wish sometimes I lived far away in another country where there are no wet days and grey skies and muggy atmospheres, and where the hedges do not drip, and the lanes do not stand ankle deep in mud, and the old walls exude moisture indoors, and one’s pretty shoes do not go mouldy if not wiped over daily. I should like to be in a land like Italy, where all the people sing and dance and keep holiday, and the bells in the towers are ever ringing, and the lads have bunches of gold and silver flowers in their hats, and the girls have scarlet skirts, and the village musicians sit in a cart adorned with birch branches and ribands and roses, and the trumpets go tu-tu! and the drums bung-bung!—I have read about it, and cried for vexation that I was not there.’
‘But the pixy?’
‘I would banish all pixies and black Copplestones and Whish hounds; they belong to rocks and moors and darkness and storm. I hate gloom and isolation.’
‘You are happy at Morwell, Miss Eve. One has but to look in your face and see it. Not a crabbed line of care, not the track of a tear, all smoothness and smiles.’
The girl twinkled with pleasure, and said, ‘That is because we are in midsummer; wait till winter and see what becomes of me. Then I am sad enough. We are shut in for five months—six months—seven almost, by mud and water. O, how the winds howl! How the trees toss and roar! How the rain patters! That is not pleasant. I wish, I do wish, I were a squirrel; then I would coil myself in a corner lined with moss, and crack nuts in a doze till the sun came again and woke me up with the flowers. Then I would throw out all my cracked nutshells with both paws, and leap to the foot of a tree, run up it, and skip from branch to branch, and swing in the summer sunshine on the topmost twig. O, Mr. Jasper, how much wiser than we the swallows are! I would rather be a swallow than a squirrel, and sail away when I felt the first frost to the land of eternal summer, into the blazing eye of the sun.’
‘But as you have no wings——’
‘I sit and mope and talk to Barbara about cows and cabbages, and to father about any nonsense that comes into my head.’
‘As yet you have given me no description of the pixy.’
‘How can I, when I scarce saw him? I will tell you exactly what happened, if you will not curl up the corner of your lips, as though mocking me. That papa never does. I tell him all the rhodomontade I can, and he listens gravely, and frightens and abashes me sometimes by swallowing it whole.’
‘Where did you see, or not see, the pixy?’