“It is quite impossible, you know, that they should go on living like this indefinitely. They are practically cut off from the sea already, and every summer there are more and more campers. Think how these hills would be overrun, and with what sort of people, if we went back to Fairshore and told what we know of the Treasure?” “Well, we aren’t going to be allowed to. Do you remember last summer how one of a hunting party in these same hills wandered away from his companions and was found afterwards, dazed and witless? He was thought to have had a fall or something. But now I know that like us, he stumbled on the Outliers and they gave him the Cup.” “That may work very well when they get us singly,” Herman agreed, “but a whole party of campers now—the wonder is they have been exempt so long. Their trails go everywhere.” I could have reminded Herman then of one who walked in their trails and believed them trodden out by deer, who caught them nearly at their faggot gathering and thought only of wood-choppers. Or I might have asked him if even now he could find any Outlier in the woods who did not wish to be found. But I waited to hear the whole of his idea. “They are getting no good out of their Treasure as it is, and paying too dear for its keep. A girl like Zirriloë ought to be married, you know ... with all that capacity for loving ... what a wife she would make ... for ... anybody.” I had not said anything to the contrary, but Herman took on an insisting tone. “She would pick up things,” he said, “and her beauty would carry her anywhere——” He broke off, staring into the brown shallows as if he were watching of that beauty carrying her somewhere out of the bounds of her present life, and the sight pleased him. “But your idea?” “Well, it’s only that they should take up their Treasure, abolish all this business of the Ward, and with the proceeds of the jewels buy themselves a tract of land in which the law could protect them from the encroachments of House-Folk and Far-Folk alike. I know a man in the forestry bureau who would be able to tell me how it could be managed.” He said that with so great an implied indifference to any objection I might entertain, that I began to feel a very quick resentment. I began to wonder if that old inclusive sympathy had ever been at all, if indeed it had not grown, as I felt this whole Outland experience to have done, out of my expectant wish for it. “It would mean so much to us ... to those of us who care about such things,” he corrected himself, as if already a little less sure of me, “to have their social system working in plain sight. Their notions of the common good ... I’ve talked with the men a bit ... what they’ve worked out without any of our encumbrances, if they could take it up now with all our practical advantages—the University might establish a sort of protectorate——But you don’t seem to care for the idea, Mona.”