“Come,” said the youth, “I have always wanted to know how the Far-Folk told that part of the tale so as not to be ashamed of it.” Prassade sprang up protesting that there should be no communication between them and the Hostage on a forbidden matter. Some debate followed among the elders as to that. I could see the smith sitting in his accustomed attitude, knees doubled, hands clasped about them, his chin resting on his knees. The eyes were black in the twilight under the faun’s profile and the streaked, springy hair, yet always as if they had a separate furtive intelligence of their own. It occurred to me suddenly, that in this very debate precipitated by Ravenutzi, the Outliers were talking about the Treasure, and that he did not care in what fashion so long as they talked. Instinctively as I felt this, turning in my mind like a weed in the surf, I looked toward Trastevera as one turns in a dim room toward the light, holding out my mind to her as to one of better sight. I caught the eyes of Ravenutzi, the iris, opaque and velvety, disappearing under the widening pupil of his fixed gaze. I felt the rushing suggestion back away from the shore of my mind and leave it bare. There was something I had meant to speak to Trastevera about, and I had forgotten what it was. It was brought back to me the next day, which was the one before the move to Leaping Water. We were sitting in Evarra’s hut, Herman and I, with Noche, for the wind and cloud of the Council had contrived to blow up a rain that drummed aloud on the bent fern but scarcely reached us through the thick tent of boughs. Above us we could hear the wind where it went hunting like a great cat, but down at the bottom of the pit of redwoods it could scarcely lift the flap of the door. And without some such stir or movement of life within, one might have passed a trail’s breadth from the house of Evarra and not suspected it, so skillfully was it contrived within one of those sapling circles that spring up around the decayed base of ancient redwoods, like close-set, fluted columns round a ruined altar. Every family had two or three such rooms, not connected, not close together, but chosen with that wild instinct for unobtrusiveness with which the Outliers cloaked the business of living. From the middle of one of these, smoke could go up through the deep well of green and mingle undetected with the blue haze of the forest. Deep within, tents of skin could be drawn against the rain which beat upon them with a slumberous sound and dripped all down the shouldering colonnade.