“There are some among us,” she said, considering, “who can lie in their beds at night and hear the deer crossing at Lower Fern; some who can stand in their doors and see the face of a man moving on the cliffs at Leaping Water. But I am one who can see trouble coming before the bearer of it has reached Broken Tree. Have you such?” “I have heard of them.” “Do you know then if they see better or worse, for loving?” I could not tell her that, though I wished to, since she made such a point of it. I had to content myself with asking her how it was with herself. “Very much better,” she laughed, and colored; “or worse.” She frowned, sighing. “I will tell you how that is.” “When I was just grown,” said Trastevera, “I was chosen to be—to fulfill a certain duty which falls every ten years to some young woman of the tribe. It was a duty which kept my heart occupied so that there was no time for loving or being loved. I was much apart and alone, and it was then that my Gift came to me, the gift of Far-Seeing. It served the tribe on many occasions, particularly on one when we were at war with the Far-Folk. I saw them breaking through at River Ward, and again I saw them when they tried to get at us from the direction of the sea——But it was not of that I meant to tell you. After I was released from my duty I had planned because, because——” She seemed to have the greatest difficulty getting past this point, which for so direct a personality as hers was unusual. I gathered that the matter was involved in the tribal mysteries which Herman had warned me to avoid, so I could not help her much with questioning. “Because of a certain distinction which they paid me, I had planned,” she went on at last, “to have no love and no interest but theirs. It came as a shock to me when Persilope was made Warden of the Council, to find that it was agreed on every side that I should marry him.” “Didn’t you love him then?” I was curious to know. “I scarcely knew him, but I knew what he was, and if it was thought best for me to love him, I wished, of course, to do what was best. And Persilope wished it also.” “You could do that? Love, I mean where you were told to love.” Somehow the idea filled me with a strange trepidation. “If the man was love worthy, why not?” She was surprised in her turn. “So long as my heart was not yet given, it was mine to give where the Outliers would be best served by it. Do you mean to say,” she asked, sensing my incredulity, “that it is not so with the House-Folk? Do you not also serve the tribe most?” “With our lives and our goods,” I admitted. “But not with your loving? But if you love only to yourselves, is not the common good often in peril from it?” “Often and often,” I agreed. Suddenly it began to seem a childish and ineffectual thing that we should be in the most important issues of life so at the mercy of place and incident, obscuring coquetries and tricks of dress.