"Don't rhyme—in English poetry?" he stammered, paling under the blow. But Miss Spear had sprung to her feet and stood looking down on him with the sportive but remote radiance of some woodland spirit.

"Oh, but what does all that matter? I don't know what made me even speak of it." She continued to look at him, and as she did so, the anxious groping expression of her short-sighted eyes, as she tried to read his, suddenly humanized her face and brought her close again. "It was just my incurable mania for taking everything to pieces. Gilding the lily—who was the fool who said that wasn't worth doing? … But I shouldn't have spoken, you know, Vance, if I didn't believe you have the gift … the real gift … 'the sublime awkwardness that belittles talent,' as George Frenside calls it … "

His heart swelled as he listened. How she knew how to bind up the hurts she made! "The sublime awkwardness … " He trembled with the shock of the phrase. Who talked or wrote like that, he wondered? Was it anyone he could see, or whose books he could get hold of—in the Willows library, perhaps? "Who's that you spoke of?" he asked breathlessly.

"The man who can talk to you better than anybody else about English poetry."

"Oh, do you know him? Can I see him? Is he alive?"

To each question Miss Spear, still looking down on him, nodded her assent. "He's the friend I spoke of just now. He's staying at Eaglewood. He's the literary critic of The Hour." She watched the effect of this announcement with her sleepy narrowed glance. "I'll bring him down to see you some day—the day I show you the Willows library," she said.

Vance had never heard of Frenside, or the paper called The Hour; but the assurance with which she pronounced the names stamped them with immediate importance. His heart was beating furiously; but such shining promises were no longer enough for him. Upton's allusions to Miss Spear's unreliability and elusiveness came back to him; and he remembered with a new resentfulness his hours of waiting at Miss Lorburn's door. Perhaps something of this incredulity showed in his eyes, for Miss Spear added, with one of her sudden touches of gentleness: "I can't tell you now just what day; but I'll leave word with Upton at the nursery, I promise I will. And now come, Vance, we must pack up and start. Our sunrise isn't ours any longer. It belongs to the whole stupid world… ."

Chapter 5

Waking near noon that day from the sleep into which she had fallen after the vigil on Thundertop, Héloïse Spear sat up in bed and thought: "What's wrong?"