She deliberately believed it was the glorious autumn weather that made her feel this stimulant in the air, in the sea-bordered forest, in the society of young people; that amusing Captain Ross, little Mr. Brown, the pretty Howel-Jones child, and Mr. Awdas, for instance. With pleasure she accepted Mr. Awdas's invitation, one afternoon, to walk through the forest with him and down to the oyster-beds, the pride of that part of the country. She thought that Captain Ross was coming too, but it appeared that Captain Ross and the little Brown boy had gone for a walk in the opposite direction, to prospect around that woodcutter's hut. She and the young flyer set out together, walking lightly and quickly in step; their shadows, flung on the road in front of them, showed a curious likeness that one would not, looking at the pair, have noticed, he so blond, and blue-eyed, and boyish--she whimsical, brown-haired, plain of feature. But the shapes of both, blue silhouettes on the white road, were young and supple, both characteristically small-headed, wide in the shoulder, slim in the flank, and long from hip to knee. Seeing them from their shadows only, one might have guessed a brother and his sister swinging easily along together. The shadows broke, striping the red bodies of the pines as they entered the forest from the road. "It's jollier walking further up," said Mrs. Cartwright, taking a path to the left. "We get glimpses of the sea all the way along; this way." He followed her in silence. He had been in a silent mood all day, she had noticed. She asked him, looking back with a little glance of concern, if he had not been sleeping again. "Oh yes, I've slept all right--slept like a top," he reassured her from behind. The path was so narrow that they could only walk one abreast through the arbutus bushes. He told her: "I haven't had any bother at all since--that night----" "Good!" said Mrs. Cartwright heartily, but he had not finished speaking; he was concluding in a low voice, "that night when you were such an angel to me." "Oh, please don't!" she laughed, looking ahead. "You make me feel like something off a Christmas card of my childhood; it's not a bit like me, believe me." She was not looking at him; she did not know, just now, that his eyes were fastened on the lithe brown length of her as she made her way through the bushes that seemed to catch at her, offering their bouquets of white flowers, their jewels of orange and scarlet, as she passed. Presently they grew less thickly, the arbutus bushes; they seemed to fall back into the forest. The two people walking, reached a little rise in the ground, and now a rush of salter air was mingling with the warm pine-scent that hung everywhere about them, and now there was a familiar sapphire gleam through the pine-boughs that showed black and fringed against sea and sky.