Page:Daphne, an Autumn Pastoral.djvu/60

 shepherd god, but always she was conscious of a presence in the sunshine on the hills.

On the eighth morning, as she paced the garden walks, a lizard scampered from her path, and she chased it as a five year old child might have done. A slim cypress tree stood in her way; she grasped it in her arms, and held it, laying her cheek against it as if it were a friend. Some new sense was dawning in her of kinship with branch and flower. She was forgetting how to think; she was Daphne, the Greek maiden, whose life was half the life of a tree.

When she took her arms from the tree she saw that he was there, looking at her from over the hedge, with the golden brown lights in eyes and hair, and the smile that had no touch of amusement in it, only of happiness.

"Sometimes," he murmured, "you remind me of Hebe, but on the whole, I think you are more like my sister Diana."

"Tell me about Diana," begged Daphne,