He lay at her feet, leaning on his elbow, for an hour or more. He had meant to gauge her intellect, experience and character in a few minutes. It was a recreation which had sometimes amused him when with women. As soon as his curiosity was satisfied he was done with them. But the discoveries he had made in those pretty little dwellings innocently opening their doors to wandering hearts of marriageable men! The miserable shams inside, the traps, the dark rooms full of all uncleanness! To-day he forgot his system of exploration. He began to feel the physical effect of coming from close streets and striving work into this vast open space--the drowsiness which men experience on high mountains or by the sea, and which has a subtle, lasting enchantment in it. The damp wind bent and whitened the stretches of salt grass in the meadows behind him; brown clouds swept from west to east overhead in endless procession; the great dun-colored plane of the sea rose and fell steadily: for the rest, except the shrill pipe of a fishhawk perched on a dead tree by its nest, there was silence. He spoke to Jane now and then, but for the most part forgot her. She had fallen into the motionless quiet which seemed habitual to her. Some of the brilliant women he knew would have dug holes in the sand, or chattered gossip, or interpreted to him with much intellectual force the meaning of land and sky, or have taken their last love-affair or other private little misery to give words to the complaint of the sea. This girl seemed only a part of the shore, as much as sea or sand. The sun warmed, the air blew on her as on them: if they gave her anything besides, she too kept their secret. Occasionally Neckart roused himself to talk briefly to her, and noticed then a blunt directness in her speech that would have appalled an ordinary hearer. It was her habit and choice to say nothing, but if pushed to the wall what was there that she would not say? The dog, lying at her feet watching him steadily, did not give up to him the secret of its own being or its opinion of himself; but if it once did speak it would do both, and with no white lies in the words either. "The girl is like her dog," thought Neckart. She rose at last, and went across the sands to her father. Neckart was soon conscious of an uneasy change in everything about him. The atmosphere of sunlit rest was broken. The clouds only meant rain, the sand was sand, and the sea but a wet swash of water: he began to look at his watch and think of the trains. The influence that had quieted him so unaccountably had been in the girl, then? He shut his eyes and tried to recall the erect figure, the fall of yellow hair, the clear Scandinavian face. He felt the same strong repulsion from her, yet in their brief interview she had certainly affected him uncontrollably--brought him back to old boyish ways of thinking. It was perhaps, he thought, because he was unused to such absolutely honest women.