She held on the way of her talk. “Now you are admiring me and making a mental note of my shape. You will record, later on, that the sky behind the blossom”—she turned to look—“is all tender apple-green, because it’s soon going to begin to be evening. Well, look at me.” She stood up on the toes of her slender shoes, and threw her arms out and her head back, so that he could study her breast and throat. He did so, and discusses the twin blossoms of her, and her whole shape, as a relation of subtle, slender curves that had a most stimulating effect on the mind and carried it beyond thoughts of physical beauty to profound thoughts of an informing creative spirit. He mentions that her throat was a springing flowerstalk. “There,” she said at last. “You have looked, and it’s nothing to me. It would not be nothing if I were in love. I should be glad and happy at being studied. But I’m glad to be quite assured that I’m not, because now I know that one day, soon perhaps, I shall be able to ask you questions—questions I could put to no woman, last of all my mother, and no other man. You are the only soul in the world, Ambrose, who could receive from a woman such questions as I shall ask you—the only soul who could answer them without being silly. Soon—there are things I must ask you soon. Over there,” she pointed to the distant mountains, now cold and spiritual in the sinking sun—“over there, perhaps, we shall find someone, and there will no longer be something missing. There will be a note found to complete a music. And you,” she added with sudden malice—“you shall be marriage registrar.” Then Ruby came wandering back—a lazy, redheaded Juno—and with her hands she clasped a mass of flowers to her bosom. “These are for the ship,” she observed. “Why didn’t you come and help me when I called? And what have you been jawing about? You’re always jawing, you two.” “We’ve been talking most frightful stupid nonsense,” said Lychnis. “I expect so,” replied Ruby with unconcern. Then some of the others came from the ship, and they all gathered flowers until the silver moon rose out of the fissure of a hill into the tender, trembling sky. Mist began to form, and drove them back to the _Floating Leaf_, and it was not long before there was nothing to be seen but the mist and the moon, and here and there a plum-tree on a black knoll rising out of the mist, and a flight of wild geese crossing the sky. 10