“I like it. I like wind,” she added, turning her smile upon Owen. “Don’t you? It’s very nice to be back here again. I always love coming back to any place I know.” “When the tide is out it looks like a Whistler water-colour,” I went on, thinking it a pity that this should be lost. But probably neither Katherine nor Owen had ever heard of Whistler. “It looks to me very like rain,” said the former, glancing at the heavy clouds over Slieve Donard. Owen took no notice at all of my remark. “Conversation means nothing to Owen,” I reflected, impatiently, “unless it takes the form of argument. Anything merely suggestive or decorative is lost upon him.” And I felt annoyed because they had both begun to chatter commonplaces about Katherine’s journey――what kind of passage she had had; as if it mattered! Then I became lost in contemplation of her. A year had certainly made a tremendous difference! “Last winter she probably came out,” I said to myself, with vague memories of Miss Broughton’s novels. At all events, in twelve months she had managed to put at least five years between us. It was quite conceivable that she was already engaged to be married, while I was but a timid school-boy, who could only envy from afar the happiness of her lover. And the thought that perhaps there _was_ a lover cast a vivid illumination on my own feeling for her, made plainer than ever the difference, how carefully veiled soever, between friendship and love. I loved her with that love which, idealize it as I might, was really the expression of a simple law of nature. Meanwhile she was talking to Owen, who was explaining to her some theory of the influence of the tides upon the earth, and of the moon on the tides. How, in the first five minutes, he had contrived to get on to such a subject I could not guess. It was fearfully like him, nevertheless, and Katherine appeared to be interested. No matter in what company he found himself Owen never talked about anything except the things he was interested in. Last night it had been a little delicious to hear him discuss Plato’s “Republic” with Miss Dick, who, though immensely pleased, was always at her silliest when taken seriously. To converse with Miss Dick was like trying to get a definite impression from a kaleidoscope; you no sooner fixed your attention on one particular idea than it dissolved into something quite different. And yet Miss Dick had views――political, religious, social,――derived from a deceased parent, who had been an apostle of free thought. Only she would interrupt her expression of the profoundest of these to wonder if Sissie McIldowie was really engaged to young Stevenson. And now Owen was talking to Katherine about the tides. I watched her and knew she liked him. She liked his rough brown mane, his clear eyes, with their kindness and innocence, for Owen, in spite of the “Kreutzer Sonata” and the rest, was as innocent as a child. There was something fine about Owen, and it was very visible in his face.