Page:Idalia, by 'Ouida' volume 3.djvu/90

Rh moss, and screening the coarse-hewn wooden trenchers with vine-leaves and flowers, that it was rather like such a forest banquet as Theocritus or Ben Jonson loved to cast in verse, than like the meal, in a wretched refuge, of fugitives for whom every moment might bring tiie worst terrors of captivity and death.

When it was done—that travail of willing, tender service—he could have swept it down again with a stroke of his hand.

"I am a fool," be thought, with a smile that had a sigh in it "A child might thank me for those trifles; but she—wild strawberry-leaves for one who wants the laurels of fame, the gold foliage of a diadem!"

Yet he stooped down again, and changed the garniture a little, so that the snow-white arums might lie nearer the scarlet of the £ruit. He had a paínter's heart, and instinct told him that beauty in the lowliest things has ever a sweet psalm of consolation in it; he loved, and his love unconsciously told him that a coil of forest flowers is a better utterance of it than all the gold of Ophir. It was not wasted on ber, this which be deemed so idle a trifle that she would not even note it. As her glance fell on the woodland treasures that the hands, which a few hours before, had been clenched in a