“Shall we go up higher?” I asked, and without answering me Katherine began to climb the hill-side, and I followed her over dry, springy, fragrant heather, and between huge mossy boulders that had lain undisturbed for centuries. We stopped to look at a fly-catching plant, that curious, unpleasant mixture of the animal and the vegetable. Katherine had never seen one before, and she examined the outspread, concave disc, with the skeletons, the grey husks of flies, adhering to its green surface. We found a bee struggling on his back on the purple flower of a thistle, waving his legs in the air, a ridiculous picture of intoxication. But in spite of these interruptions the silence that had crept over us lingered still. When we reached a place where the ground rose steeply for a yard or two I gave Katherine my hand to help her, and when we came to more level ground we still went on hand in hand. And with this light contact there came to me a strange, thrilling pleasure, intense yet dreamy, unlike anything I had ever known before. I did not look at my companion. When I spoke, telling her to avoid a patch of soft ground that had here spread across the path, the sound of my own voice astonished me, so unfamiliar was it, even trembling slightly; and I felt my limbs trembling. But why should it be so? What was there? Why was I nervous? Nothing had happened but this short easy climb hand in hand. I threw my hat from me and flung myself down among the heather, lying with my hands clasped behind my head, and my face turned up to the dark blue sky. Far, far below us, the sea, blue and deep, broad, beautiful and free, lay shimmering in the hot sun. I had a sensation of intense happiness, physical and mental, into which I seemed to be sinking deep and deeper. I felt my eyes grow moist, and I turned away my head that my companion might not see my face. Presently I looked round. Katherine was sitting beside me, gazing straight out at the distant sea. The broad brim of her black hat shadowed her face. The deep blue of her eyes seemed darker than before; they had the blue now of the eyes Renoir so often painted, and that I have seen nowhere else. I wanted to say something, I hardly knew what. I hovered shyly on the verge of it, like a timid bather on the brink of the sea, but there was no one to push me in, and my plunge was not taken. “It’s jolly nice here!” Those feeble words were all I could find to express the rapid rush of emotion that had shaken my whole being. The vast and complex forces of nature were stirring within me almost as unconsciously as the new leaf germinates in the growing plant. Yet there was something which, without any words at all, I must have expressed, had there been an observer to see it. I mean the helplessness of youth, its pathetic credulity and good faith, its brightness and briefness in the face of those hoary old hills, and of feelings that were almost as ancient.