“Now that I have seen them, there seems nothing in them but kindness and well-meaning. Indeed it is so unusual a thing that House-Folk should discover us, that I am not sure we ought not to pay them some little respect for it.” She made me a little whimsical acknowledgment of this sentiment, but before I could think of a reply, some slight shifting of the ringed watchers thrust forward Ravenutzi. I recalled suddenly what I had neglected to state in the midst of Prassade’s explanation, that his finding me was not the first intimation I had had of the presence of Outliers in the neighborhood of Broken Tree. Up to this time I had observed that when the Outliers had their heads together on any matter of immediate concern, it had been Ravenutzi’s habit to keep a little to one side, as though not directly affected. Now as I saw him pushed into the cleared space by the stream side, it stirred dimly in my mind that the circumstance of my first meeting with him, which I had not before mentioned, might mean something. I hardly understood what. I must have made some motion, some slight betraying glance which the smith detected. While the words were in my throat he looked at me, subtly, somehow encompassingly, as if he had projected his personality forward until it filled satisfyingly all my thought. I no longer thought it worth while to mention where I had first seen Ravenutzi nor what I had found him doing. I was taken with a sudden inexplicable warmth toward him, and a vague wish to afford him a protection for which he had not asked and did not apparently need. Swift as this passage was, I saw that Trastevera had noted it. Something dimmed in her, as if her mind had lain at the crossing of our two glances, Ravenutzi’s and mine, and been taken in the shadow. “For the disposing of the House-Folk,” she finished evenly, as though this had been in her mind from the first to say, “you had better take counsel to decide whether they shall be given the Cup at once, or be kept to await a sign.” I saw Persilope stooping to her, urging that she was tired, that she had come too far that day, she would be clearer in the morning. She shook her head still, looking once long at me, and once almost slyly at the smith, and then at us no more, but only at her husband, as she walked slowly along the meadow against the saffron-tinted sky. Then we were taken away, Herman and I, to our respective huts. The place called Deep Fern by the Outliers lay in the middle of three half hollow basins looking seaward, and clearing all the intervening hills. Barriers thick set with redwood, dividing the cupped space like the ridges of a shell, ran into a hollow full of broad oaks and brambles. Between the ridges brooks ran to join the creek that, dropping in a white torrent to the basin called Lower Fern, made a pool there, from which it was also called Deer Lake Hollow. The upper basin, long and narrow, was named from the falls, Leaping Water.