When they spoke again they were in the cloistered wood, the sea hidden by the massive trees.
“I will show you my heron’s nest,” said Gilian, anxious to add to the riches the ramble would confer on her.
She was delighted. Gilian at school had the reputation of knowing the most wonderful things of the woods, and few were taken into his confidence.
He led her a little from the path to the base of a tall tree with its trunk for many yards up as bare as a pillar.
“There it is,” he said, pointing upward to a knot of gathered twigs swaying in the upper branches.
“Oh! is it so high as that?” she cried, with disappointment. “What is the use of showing me that? I cannot see the inside and the birds.”
“But there are no birds now,” said Gilian; “they are flown long ago. Still I’m sure you can easily fancy them there. I see them quite plainly. There are three eggs, green-blue like the sky up the glen, and now--now there are three grey hairy little birds with tufts on their heads. Do you not see their beaks opening?”
“Of course I don’t,” said Nan impatiently, straining her eyes for the tree-top. “If they are all flown how can I see them?”
Gilian was disappointed with her. “But you think you see them, you think very hard,” he said, “and if you think very hard they will be there quite true.”
Nan stamped her foot angrily. “You are daft,” said she. “I don’t believe you ever saw them yourself.”
“Were you up the tree?” she pressed, looking him through with eyes that then and always wrenched the prosaic truth from him.
He flushed more redly than in his eagerness of showing the nest, his eyes fell, he stammered.
“Well,” said he, “I did not climb the tree. What is the good when I know what is there? It is a heron’s nest.”
“But there might have been no eggs and no birds in it at all,” she argued.
“That’s just it,” said he eagerly. “Lots of boys would be for climbing and finding that out, and think how vexatious it would be after all that trouble! I just made the eggs and the young ones out of my own mind, and that is far better.”
At the innocence of the explanation Nan laughed till the woods rang. Her brown hair fell upon her neck and brow, the flowers tumbled at her feet all mingled and beautiful as if summer has been raining on its queen. A bird rose from the thicket, chuck-chucking in alarm, then fled, trailing behind him a golden chain of melody.