"La! And do my eyes do all that?" Betty cried, opening them very wide in her innocent astonishment. "What a thing it is, to be sure, to be a lady. I declare, sir, you are quite out of breath with the fine things you've said. All the same they are blue in the main, and I'll have forget-me-nots, if you please, sir. There's plenty in the brook, and while your honour fetches them I'll sit here and do nothing, like the gentlefolks."
The brook ran a hundred paces below them, and the sun was hot in the dell, but Tom had no fair excuse. He ran down with a good grace, and in five minutes was back again, his hands full of tiny blossoms.
"They're like a bit of the sky," said Betty, as he pinned them in her bodice.
"Then they are like your eyes, sweet," he answered, and he stooped to pay himself for the compliment with a kiss.
But Betty slipped from him without betraying, save by a sudden blush, that she understood.
"Now, it's my turn," she cried gaily. "Do you sit, and I'll make you a posy!" And humming an air she floated through the fern to a tree of wild cherry that hung low boughs to meet the fern and fox-gloves. She began to pluck the blossom while Tom watched her and told himself that never was sweeter idyll than this, nor a maid more entrancingly fair, nor eyes more blue, nor lips more inviting, nor manners more daintily sweet and naïve. He sighed prodigiously, for he swore that not for the world would he hurt her, though it was pretty plain how it would go if he chose, and he knew that
Pride lures the little warbler from the skies!
The light-enamoured bird eluded dies.
And--and then, while his thoughts were full of this, he saw her coming back, her arms full of blossom.
"Lord, child!" he cried, "you've plucked enough for a Jack o' the Green."