'This was the lad I could have loved!' she murmured. 'This was the strong bold youth whom I thought would be my brave and bonny damo before all the countryside. Oh, what fools are women--what fools!--taken by the eye, with a falcon glance and a sheaf of nut-brown curls and a broad breast that looks as if the heart of a true man beat in it. Oh, woe is me! Oh, woe is me! I dreamed a dream, and it has no more truth in it than the slate shingle here has of silver.' She kicked downward scornfully as she spoke the crumbling slate and mia which showed here and there betwixt the heather plants in the tremulous shadow relics of a quarry worked long centuries before, and forsaken when the fires of the camp of Hun and Goth had blazed upon those hillsides. III Caris stared at her as she spoke, his whole frame thrilling and all his senses alive as they had never been before under a woman's glamour. He heeded not the derision, he thought not of the strangeness of the avowal; delicacy is not often a plant which grows in uncultured soil, and he had none of the intuition and suspicion which an educated man would have been moved by before such an avowal and such an upbraiding. He only knew, or thought he was bidden to know, that he had the power in him to please her fancy and awaken her desire. 'You love me! You can love me!' he shouted in a loud, vibrating, exultant voice which wakened all the echoes of the hills around him, and he sprang forward to seize her in his arms. But Santina, agile and strong, pushed him back, and stood aloof. 'Nay, nay, stand off!' she cried to him. 'Ne'er a coward shall touch me. All I said was, you might have won me.' 'I am no coward,' said Caris hotly. 'And why do you fool and tempt one so? 'Tis unfair. 'Tis unfair. You may rue it.' His face was convulsed, his eyes were aflame, he breathed like a bull in a hard combat. Santina smiled; that was how she liked to see a man look. She had all the delight in watching and weighing the effects of the passion which she excited that moved the great queens of Asia and the empresses of Rome. She was only a poor girl, but the love of dominance and the violence of the senses were in her strong and hot and reckless. In her was all that ferment of ambition and vanity and discontent which drives out from their hamlets those who are born with something in them different to their lot and alien to their fellows. She had never been anywhere farther afield than the hills and woods about Pistanse, but she knew that there were big cities somewhere, where men were made of money, and women wore satin all day long, and everybody ate and drank out of gold plates and silver vessels. She knew that; and to get to these kingdoms of delight was the one longing which possessed her day and night.