Again it would have been better to wade through the noisy shallows and round the boulders spongy with drenched moss, and again he suggested it; but perhaps the deep gurgle of the fall they were approaching drowned his voice. He went ahead, putting aside the worst of the brambles, and he knew without telling when they reached the pool. It was long enough to have plunged into, too wide to have leapt across even had the rocks afforded any take-off, and it deepened gradually to blackness, and then boiled pale and tumultuous again under the plunge of a twelve-foot fall. Over the pool itself the sunlight glowed in spots only through the leaves, but on one bank there was a sunny clearing of a few yards square. Then the trees began again, up and up and up to the sky, a cliff of leaves that shut the mountains out and the stream in. He let her sit down first. This she did where she could see the little plants and mosses at the water's edge endlessly a-quiver with the tumult of the fall. Then, sitting down beside her, he again felt that he must begin talking to her all over again. His mouth flickered for a moment as he thought of Percy Briggs on the Pier, and then he spoke. "If I were you I should move up here," he said. She was picking up a snail-shell to throw into the water. She turned, extraordinarily quickly, and in the seaweed eyes there was a hard and defensive look, instant, yet old. "It iss only my hat and my box," she said quickly. "Eh? Oh!----" He laughed. "I only mean there'll be brakes and wagonettes all over the place now, and anybody might come to the lake.--I say, you didn't think I meant to chuck you out, did you?" "I thought prapss you want to fiss," she replied, turning away and looking at the gasogene of black water again. He laughed again.--"Oh, no. I mean you don't sleep there, and nobody'd come here, and I could get you a lock and key so that your things would be safe. You could go there if it rained." She tossed the snail-shell into the water, neither accepting his offer nor rejecting it. "Besides," he went on, "I know that if anybody disturbed you you'd be off. Look here. I'll get you that lock and key. I'm off back to-night, and I'll bring 'em up to-morrow.--But you will be here won't you?" Again--he could not be sure--he fancied her colour deepened. "Hwhere should I go to?" she said over her shoulder. "Well--anywhere--Liverpool--anywhere." And again her reply was to gaze at the boiling of the air-bubbles at the foot of the fall.