She might well have been satisfied, even if she had been harder to please. It was a spring of the fairest water, bubbling into a tiny hollow. The little pool was like a brimming cup, with colored pebbles and dancing sand at the bottom, and delicate leaf-sprays clustered lightly round its rim. And this gem of sparkling water was set in a space of mossy sward, with trees which leant and whispered overhead, their quivering canopy pierced here and there by golden shafts of sunlight and glimpses of far-off blue.
"It is like fairy-land," said Lottie.
"Or like something in Keats's poems," Percival suggested.
"I never read a line of them, so I can't say," she answered with defiant candor, while she inwardly resolved to get the book.
He smiled: "You don't read much poetry yet, do you? Ah, well, you have time enough. How about wishing, now we are here?" he went on, stooping to look into the well. "Your wishes ought to have a double virtue on your birthday."
"I only hope they may."
"What! have you decided on something very important? Seventeen to-day! Lottie, don't wish to be eighteen: that will come much too soon without wishing."
"I don't want to be eighteen. I think seventeen is old enough," she answered dreamily.
"So do I." He was thinking, as he spoke, what a charming childish age it was, and how, before he knew Lottie, he had fancied from books that girls were grown up at seventeen.
"Now I am going to wish," she said seriously, "and you must wish after me." Bending over the pool, she looked earnestly into it, took water in the hollow of her hand and drank. Then, standing back, she made a sign to her companion.