She noticed, as she had never before had opportunity, the suggestion of a fine capacity in the shape of his open hand, and the sharp decision of its rare creases. "How deep your lines are!" she said. He looked with enquiry at the darkened features which were bent above his hand, and in reply she raked with a nail, as pink as and more polished than they, the little pile of shells back towards his thumb. "Oh, that!" he exclaimed, as she ran the tip of her finger along the furrow. "It's wonderful, isn't it? I never saw a heart line on any hand that filled me with such respect. Cut evidently by one of those obstinately permanent affections that make one gasp in books. Let's look at yours?" She opened, smiling, on a very rosy palm, a network of slender lines, grated and interlaced. "Oh, shut it up!" he frowned. "Hide it from your dearest friend. Ah, my simplicity which thought you so different from all that!" She laughed, and screwing up her hand looked down into its little cup. "Well," she said; "tell me what you see in it." But he shook his head. "I shut my eyes," he declared solemnly. "Hold it a little further off." "I shan't," she said. "I mean," he explained, "that a yard away it's everything that one could wish." She surveyed her hand reflectively. There had been those who wished it a good deal nearer than that; and who had wished in vain. "At what people call a safe distance, I suppose," she said. "I think you're very fond of safe distances." He almost started at the touch of scornful provocation in the words and in the tone. A delightful indifference to what he was or wasn't fond of had made hitherto, by its very exclusions, so much possible between them. "Do you?" he replied, his eyes still upon her bent figure. "Why?" "You weren't aware of it?" she asked. "I wasn't. I haven't been told of it before." "Perhaps, it's only with me?" she suggested. "Perhaps, it's only with you," he smiled. "How does it show?" She made, with her slender nail, little moons in the sand. "It doesn't show," she said, looking down at her finger; "one feels it." "A general attitude of caution," he suggested playfully; "such as this." "As what?" she enquired. "Oh!" he said, with a wave of his hand at the enclosing wall of cliff and the empty vastness of the sea, "this teeming beach, the fashionable resort behind it, the chaperon at our elbow!" She glanced at him with a shy smile. "Oh, not in that way," she said; "besides you couldn't help yourself; you were brought. No, one sees it mostly in the things you say." "In the things I say?" "Well, no! perhaps, in the things you don't say." "I see!" he mused, with the same air of banter, "the desert areas of omission! Others made them blossom for you like the rose? I don't succeed in even expressing things that were commonplaces with them?" "What sort of things?" she asked, her eyes again upon the sand.