The morning of the second day I went up with the girls to race in Leaping Water. We left the Middle Basin by a trail that took the side of the hill abruptly and brought us out at the foot of the second fall, above the long white torrent of the Reach. They meant to come down with the stream to the meadow again, and the game went to the one who was least out of water in that passage. I followed the windings of the creek as near as the undergrowth allowed and heard their laughter, now louder and now less than the water noises, and saw between the trees the flash of foam change to the glancing of white limbs, and the flicker of the sun on fair bodies as they drifted through the shallows. They took the falls feet foremost, curving to its flying arch, white arms wreathed backwards and wet hair blowing with the spray. The swimmers so mixed themselves with the movement of the water and the well-sunned, spacious day, that they seemed no more apart from it than the rush of the creek or the flicker of light on leaf surfaces displaced by the wind. They were no more obtrusive than that mysterious sense of presence out of which men derive gods and the innumerable fairy host. I had walked thus in that awakened recognition of sentience in the wild, in which all Outland had become a dream which hunts along the drowsy edge of sleep. I had continued in it for perhaps half an hour, in such a state that though I had no idea where we were on the map, I believe I could have set out suddenly in the right quarter for home. I had not heard my name pronounced, but I began to be aware within myself that some one had called. I was so sure of it that, though I had no intimation yet of any presence, I began to look about. After a little trouble I made out Trastevera on the opposite bank, between the willows, making signs that she wished to speak to me, and yet enjoining silence. The creek widened here and the girls were coming down, following like trout. I saw her press back among the swinging boughs as they went by, and guessed that something more than the ordinary occasion of the day was astir. Presently, when we heard from below the splash of laughter as the swimmers struck the rapids, she came across to me. “Where were you yesterday when Daria took the Cup?” she asked immediately. “By Fallen Tree, not twenty steps from you—but you were so taken up with that affair that you did not see me.” “You heard, then, what her young man said about”—she flushed sensitively—“his reasons for her not drinking. Have you heard anything of that in the Meet?” “Nothing that need disquiet you.” This was not strictly true, for Evarra had told me that all those who had opposed Trastevera’s exemption ten years before were now justifying themselves in Daria’s rebellion. “They are saying what I feared,” she said, “that it is a mistake to release the possessor of gifts from the common obligation.”