elusive appearance, so that her mouth and eyes seemed to slant upwards with a fugitive and sylvan air, which materialised but rarely,--or when, as now, he caught her at an angle,--but which always hovered there, not always willing to be revealed, but ready to glance out at the right summons, to whomsoever should hold the shibboleth to produce it. He drew rein, looking down at her, and her pony whinnied a recognition, and strayed loose to join Lovel’s horse. “Not deep!” he called to her. She ventured a few steps further. “You have seen it empty,” he rallied her. “Do you know the secret?” she asked, stopping. The water, disturbed by her advance, rippled round her knees. “Very few know it,” he replied cryptically. “Ah, but you, Lovel, you know all those secrets. How do they puddle the clay? How, to hold the water? I am sure you know it, Lovel! Are you a dowser, too? they say so, in the village. They say you can pace over the country until the hazel-twigs jump in your hand. Is it true?” “They say a lot of things in the village,” he replied laughing. “Does it matter to you what they say?” “Not when I’m up here,” he replied, tossing his head, and his horse tossed his head too, and the bridle jingled. “Well, but tell me the secret of how they make the dew-ponds,” she persisted, kicking with her foot into the water. “The secret would soon be a secret no longer,” he answered, putting her off. “And I never said I knew it.” “Ah, but you do,” she said; and thought that those who knew the secret of the dew-ponds got their knowledge in a straight line of tradition from the earliest inhabitants of those regions. “Oh, I do envy you, Lovel,” she said, forgetting that she stood in water and stamping with her foot so that it splashed up round her, “I do envy you all the queer things you have got behind you,--they all seem to run into your fingers with your blood.” He laughed again,--he seemed to be in a good humour to-day, and well he might be, with the bright grass glistening round his horse’s feet, and over his head the bright blue-and-white spaces where the kestrels hovered like little specks, and the green pattern of the fields far, far below. He leant over in his saddle to pat the neck of Clare’s muzzling pony; they were very much alone up there, with the two horses and the two dogs, and the clouds racing by. She stood in the dew-pond with that fleeting look still upon her face, as though she were a nymph,--a nymph of English uplands, of so fresh and candid and sky-mirroring a thing as a dew-pond. The olive and the myrtle were alien to her; the pony and the sheep were her beasts, not the goat; the round pool of water at her feet shone like the fallen shield of a young Amazon. He looked down at her; she looked up at him; they both represented their own particular aspect of romance, each to the other. “Lovel!” she said, happily. They shared well-being; their own physical well-being, and the wholesome cleanliness of the Downs and sky.