Yaverland spoke behind her, indolently, because he felt he had all the rest of his life to be happy with her. "Where's this Rachael Wing you talk about? Aren't you still pals?" Ellen swallowed her unshed tears. "'Deed, yes," she said, "but she's gone to London to be an actress. I wish I knew how she was getting on. She's never written since the first month." "Probably she's having hard luck." "Not Rachael. She's not like me. I always was a poor creature beside her. Anybody could see that Rachael had a wonderful life before her. She's not a bit like me." "But that's just what you look like." "Havers!" she said dully. "And me so pairfectly miserable!" As soon as the words were out of her mouth she was frozen with horror. In the presence of one who was both a man and English she had admitted the disgraceful fact that she was not an imperial creature insolent with success and well pleased with the earth her footstool. She scrambled to her feet and ran coltishly past him and over the bridge, hiding her face and calling gaily, "Come on! I want to get up on the hills!" And he followed slowly, thinking pretty things about her. When he drew abreast of her she had pulled off her tam-o'-shanter and taken out her hairpins, and her hair was blowing sideways across her breast and back. "It's good to feel the wind through one's hair," she said. "I wish I had short hair like a man's." "Why don't you cut yours off then?" "I somehow feel it would be a shame when I have such a deal of it," she answered innocently, and fell to chattering of the Spanish military nun that de Quincey wrote about. She had passed herself off as a man all right. Did he think a girl could go the length of that anywhere nowadays? No? Surely there was somewhere? Oh, she was a child, a little child, and it was not fair to talk to her of love for a little while yet. It might be dangerous, for he had heard that sometimes, when a girl was sought by men too soon, her girlhood tried to hold her back from womanhood by raising obscure terrors that might last as long as life. He would wait until she was eighteen. Yet when the avenue bent at right angles half up the hillside, and they drew together as an army of winds marched down upon them from the mountains, she looked at him through her scattered hair, and her face was wholly a woman's. So might a woman smile who was drowning under a deep tide and loved to drown so; yet from a brave wisdom in her eyes it could be seen that she was abandoning herself not to death but to life. This, beyond all doubt, was adult love, though she herself was not aware of it. He had only to admit it by some significant speech or act, to rise spiritually to the occasion, and they would be fused together as perpetual lovers.