Following her glance, he tried, as he had so often tried in the last weeks, to see with her eyes. The peace of the pool beside them, like all peace in Nature, was an illusion. Minnows steered over the brown sand, or whipped their magnified shadows, blurred and globular, through sunny patches under the farther bank; even where the water lay most dark and thick, weeds tugged slowly at the tether; and over the surface her “river-drivers,” snapping and kicking between wind and water, floated erratically down an imperceptible current. “About those?” he asked incredulously. “What, those beetles?” “Yes.” Her eyes danced with that look of hers which he had never seen in any other person,--a look both grave and whimsical. “Yes, they’re only beetles. See, though: they scoot here and there, but always head upstream. They can’t have any reason to, and it’s so much easier going down. And still they’re stubborn, and fight along. I wonder--I think they must have an Idea.” “You’re a funny girl!” he laughed. Yet as he watched, the darting insects began to appear not wholly insensate. “Now the fish down there,” she continued, as though to herself, “they nose about their business. And the day-flies--with them it’s all dancing,--just eat, drink, and be merry. But the river-drivers--see that one, floating on the blade of grass, all tired out; and there he goes again, up and up, and all the time carried below. They’re like--like people. They’re betwixt and between, like us. And it may be no use. But they must. Their Idea. And the stream flows down and down, and sweeps everything--” Her words were quiet as the brook beyond. “A parable,” said Miles. His voice rose no higher; for both were suddenly a little awed, as though their spirits had caught some rushing echo of that broader flood, the irrevocable and universal. And now some influence as wide, something neither gradual nor swift, closed about them powerfully. They had leaned forward, shoulder to shoulder, over the brown pool; but at this mystical, blind accession, each felt the other tremble and draw back. A kingfisher chattered angrily, away in the upper reaches. It was the recurring silence, however, that alarmed. Of all their silences, this seemed as it were the end, the turning, and the explication. But still it endured, throbbing with a perilous energy. Slowly, in a kind of sleep-waking effort, the girl got upon her feet. “Come,” she said. Her face, in the alder shadows, was very pale. A shiver of light from the brook played golden about her throat, like the reflected glow of buttercups in the children’s game. “Come,” she repeated. “We can’t--we must get home.” Moved by the helplessness of that command, he followed. They crossed the sunset pastures almost without word or look, like pilgrims crossing the Debatable Ground. And when they had climbed the last hill, and come racing steeply down toward the river and the house, she went straight to the shelter of Ella’s kitchen.