But perhaps I was getting too childish; I bored her, and for the first time she looked away from me, looked at a picture on the wall, then at another picture. But it was not easy for me to stop now, after having spoken hardly at all for several weeks, and feeling profoundly excited besides--heaven only knows why. "How did you like the country?" she asked suddenly. As I could not see the drift of this question, I merely looked at her. "Weren't you at Nikolai's mother's house?" she persisted. "Yes." "What is she like?" "Are you interested in her?" "No, I don't suppose so. Oh dear!" she sighed wearily. "Come, come, you mustn't sound like that when you're newly engaged! What the country was like? Well, there was a schoolmaster--you know, an old bachelor, sly, and amusing. Said he knew me, and put on the most extraordinary airs the first day. And of course I returned the compliment and said I had come exclusively to meet him. 'Impossible!' he said. 'Why should it be?' I said; 'forty years a schoolmaster, a respected man, permanent churchman, chairman, indispensable everywhere!' Well, then I attended his class. Most impressive. He talked continually; for once he had an audience, almost like a school inspection. 'You there, Peter! Ahem,' he said. 'There was a horse and a man, and one of them was riding on the other's back. Which one was riding, Peter?' 'The man,' Peter replies. A pause. 'Well, maybe you're right, Peter--maybe the man was riding. Just like sin, like the devil riding us....'" But she was looking at the wall again, drifting away from me again. I changed the subject clumsily: "Of course you'd rather hear about people you know--about Tore Peak, for instance. Josephine has been in town." "Yes, I know," she said, nodding her head. "Remember the old man at Tore Peak? I don't think I'll ever forget him. In a certain number of years I shall be like him--perhaps not quite so old. Then I shall be a child again with age. One day he came out, and went down to the field. I saw him; he had mittens on. You know he eats all sorts of things, and I saw him lie down and eat the hay." She stared at me foolishly. "But I must say he didn't look as though he had ever eaten hay before--possibly because it was rotting. It was the hay that had been left, you know--rotting down for next year--for the next tourist year." "You seem to think," she said smiling, "that you have to cheer me up, because I'm terribly unhappy. I'm quite the reverse. Perhaps he's too good for me; that's what his sister seems to think, anyhow, because she tried to stop it. But I'm going to enjoy snubbing that sister of his. Anyhow, I'm not unhappy, and that isn't the reason I've come. I'd really much rather have him than anyone else--since I can't get the one I really want." "You've told me this before, child--last winter, in fact. But the man you want has gone his way--besides, you said yourself that you didn't belong with him, or rather, that he didn't with you--I mean--"