"Hold this!" she says, giving me a diminutive fly-book, out of which she has taken a pair of scissors. I obey meekly. She snips the gut. "Have you a sharp knife? If I strip the hook you can push it through; it is lucky it isn't in the cartilage." I suppose I am an awful idiot, but I only handed her the knife, and she proceeded as calmly as if stripping a hook in a man's ear were an every-day occurrence. Her gown is of some soft gray stuff, and her gray-leather belt is silver clasped. Her hands are soft and cool and steady, but there is a rarely disturbing thrill in their gentle touch. The thought flashed through my mind that I had just missed that--a woman's voluntary tender touch, not a paid caress--all my life. "Now you can push it through yourself; I hope it won't hurt much." Taking the hook, I push it through, and a drop of blood follows it. "Oh!" she cries, but I assure her it is nothing, and stick the hook surreptitiously in my coat sleeve. Then we both laugh, and I look at her for the first time. She has a very white forehead, with little tendrils of hair blowing round it under her gray cap; her eyes are gray (I didn't see that then,--I only saw they were steady, smiling eyes, that matched her mouth). Such a mouth! the most maddening mouth a man ever longed to kiss, above a too pointed chin, soft as a child's; indeed, the whole face looks soft in the misty light. "I am sorry I spoilt your sport!" I say. "Oh, that don't matter, it's time to stop. I got two brace, one a beauty." She is winding in her line, and I look in her basket; they _are_ beauties, one two-pounder, the rest running from a half to a pound. "What fly?" "Yellow dun took that one; but your assailant was a partridge spider." I sling her basket over my shoulder; she takes it as a matter of course, and we retrace our steps. I feel curiously happy as we walk toward the road; there is a novel delight in her nearness. The feel of woman works subtilely and strangely in me; the rustle of her skirt as it brushes the black-heads in the meadow-grass, and the delicate perfume, partly violets, partly herself, that comes to me with each of her movements, is a rare pleasure. I am hardly surprised when she turns into the garden of the inn; I think I knew from the first that she would. "Better bathe that ear of yours, and put a few drops of carbolic in the water." She takes the basket as she says it, and goes into the kitchen.