But she had shown a comprehension of his position, of his motives, of his difficulties, which was welcome in the isolation wherein he lived, and made him grateful to her, as he would have been for the sympathy of some other man. He discerned the intelligence which shone through the fog of her ignorance, and he appraised at its due value the courage which kept her in perpetual opposition to those with whom she lived. Her warnings did not influence his conduct, but he knew that they were founded on a just estimate of those around him. They weighed, however, but little upon him, because his philosophy was fatalistic, and he had that apathetic indifference to danger which comes from extreme unhappiness in life. When you have lost all except actual existence, it seems to matter little if sheer existence be taken as well. He had been now eighteen months in these woods, seeing no faces but those of peasants hostile to him, and exchanging no single word with anyone of cultured intelligence. Muriella was ignorant as any one of the sheep, who only knew their winter and summer tracks; but she understood with her heart, if not with her mind, and he found relief in telling her a little of those “old forgotten far-off things,” which seemed to him so many æons of time away, though they belonged in truth only to his own life of a year or two earlier. It did him good to call up that past, these scenes, all those who had been with him in his daily life; it relieved him of that dazed sense of unreality which came upon him as on men in the solitude of a condemned cell. Once he spoke of the woman he loved: not by name, but as Surrey might have spoken of Geraldine, with bated breath and unuttered prayer; and having thus spoken once, he did so again, and yet again, tracing her portrait in words, pressing the dagger of regret into his heart as lovers love to do in every age. And Muriella listened, growing pale, hanging on his words, till in her rude fancy an image shaped itself from his words clothed in starlight, crowned with the pale hellebore, fugitive, spiritual, unreachable. Imagination was dormant in her; it caught light at the flame of his higher intelligence. She could not see clearly by it, but she saw a ray before her feet--a soft faint green light like that of the glowworm in the woodland paths, the ray of awaking comprehension, with its companion pain. She did not know why she thought of this unknown lady thus. Perhaps it was because, when he first spoke of her, the hellebore was in blossom all over the awakening woods. It did not occur to him that he did a cruel thing in interesting thus in his fate a poor untutored maiden; he scarcely thought of her at all; he spoke to her because he read loyalty and sympathy in her gaze as in the eyes of a dog; and because he was weary of the long, dumb, friendless front in which his mind and memories were imprisoned.