"I wondered whether you'd come again," he said, so simply and naturally that the girl, whose grey eyes had become intent on his scanty hair with a surprised and pained expression, looked directly into his smiling and agreeable face. "Did you come to fish this pool?" he asked. "You are very welcome to. _I_ can't catch anything." "Why do you think that I am out fishing?" she asked in a curiously clear, still voice--very sweet and young--but a voice that seemed to grow out of the silence instead of to interrupt it. "You are fishing, are you not? or at least you came here to fish last evening?" he said. "Why do you think so?" "You had a net." He expected her to say that it was a hammock which she was trailing through the woods in search of two convenient saplings on which to hang it. She said: "Yes, it was a net." "Did my being here drive you away from your favourite pool?" She looked at him candidly. "You are not a sportsman, are you?" "N--no," he admitted, turning red. "Why?" "People who take trout in nets are fined and imprisoned." "Oh! But you _said_ you had a net." "It wasn't a fish net." He waited. She offered no further explanation. Sometimes she looked at him, rather gravely, he thought; sometimes she looked at the stream. There was not the slightest hint of embarrassment in her manner as she stood there--a straight, tall, young thing, grey-eyed, red-lipped, slim, with that fresh slender smoothness of youth; clad in grey wool, hatless, thick burnished hair rippling into a heavy knot at the nape of the whitest neck he had ever seen. The stiller she stood, apparently wrapped in serious inward contemplation, the stiller he remained, as though the spell of her serene self-absorption consigned him to silence. Once he ventured, stealthily, to smack a mosquito, but at the echoing whack there was, in her slowly turned face, the calm surprise of a disturbed goddess; and he felt like saying "excuse me." "Do they bite you?" she asked, lifting her divine eyebrows a trifle. "Bite me! Good heavens, don't they bite you? But I don't suppose they dare----" "What?" "I didn't mean 'dare' exactly," he tried to explain, feeling his ears turning a fiery red, and wondering why on earth he should have made such a foolish remark. "What _did_ you mean?" "N--nothing. I don't know. I say things and--and sometimes," he added in a burst of confidence, "they don't seem to _mean_ anything at all." To himself he groaned through ground teeth: "What an ass I am. What on earth is the matter with me?" She considered him in silence, candidly; and redder and redder grew his ears as he saw that she was quietly inspecting him from head to foot with an interest perfectly unembarrassed, innocently intent upon her inspection. Then, having finished him down to his feet, she lifted her eyes, caught his, looked a moment straight into them, then sighed a little. "Do you know," she said, "I ought not to have come here again." "Why?" he asked, astonished.