He laughed--the glad laugh of a truant schoolboy--and knocked the ashes out of his pipe. "I'm capable of walking all night too! Only then you might imagine the hot weather had turned my brain. But indeed, little woman, if you had been sickened with sunlight and scorched earth as I have been for the last three months, you'd understand how a man may feel a bit lightheaded in the first few days that he's quit of it all." "And was I very horrid to be playing up here in the cool all the time?" she asked, pricked by the memory of Honor's words to one of her rare touches of compunction. "My dear, what nonsense! It would have been double as bad if you had been there too." Sincerity rang in his tone, and she noted the fact with a sigh of relief. She was not altogether heartless, this fragile slip of womanhood. She merely desired, like many of us, the comfort of being selfish without the unbecomingness of appearing so. "We'll sit out here together and talk till it gets dark," she announced with a pretty air of decision, lest the invitation to walk should be renewed. "Stay where you are, and I'll fetch a stool. It's quite a treat to see you looking lazy for once in a way." She brought a stool and established herself close to him. He acknowledged her presence without removing his eyes from the storm-tossed glory of the sky. "Look, Ladybird--look!" he urged in a low tone. "We can talk afterwards." But her attention was caught and riveted by the reflection of the glory in her husband's face. "Does it please you so tremendously?" she asked in honest bewilderment. "Just a sunset! You've seen hundreds of them before." He smiled and answered nothing. Speech and emotion inhabit different hemispheres of a man's brain; woman alone is rash enough to force them into unwilling union. The clinging garment of mist, driven and dispersed by day's last flash of self-assertion, lay heaped and tumbled in the valleys, and the mountains stood knee-deep in an opalescent sea of foam. It was as though Nature, in a mood of capricious kindliness, had rent the veil, that mortals might share in the triumphal passing of the sun, whose supremacy had been in eclipse these many days.