“Do you like it?” she asked. It was the old, low, husky tone of intimacy. He felt a quick change beginning in his blood. It was the old, delicious sublimation, the thinning, almost the vaporizing of himself, as if his spirit were to be liberated. “Aye,” he nodded, smiling at her like a boy again. She bowed her head. “This was the countess’s chair,” she said in low tones. “I found her scissors down here between the padding.” “Did you? Where are they?” Quickly, with a lilt in her movement, she fetched her work-basket, and together they examined the long-shanked old scissors. “What a ballad of dead ladies!” he said, laughing, as he fitted his fingers into the round loops of the countess’s scissors. “I knew you could use them,” she said, with certainty. He looked at his fingers, and at the scissors. She meant his fingers were fine enough for the small-looped scissors. “That is something to be said for me,” he laughed, putting the scissors aside. She turned to the window. He noticed the fine, fair down on her cheek and her upper lip, and her soft, white neck, like the throat of a nettle flower, and her fore-arms, bright as newly blanched kernels. He was looking at her with new eyes, and she was a different person to him. He did not know her. But he could regard her objectively now. “Shall we go out awhile?” she asked. “Yes!” he answered. But the predominant emotion, that troubled the excitement and perplexity of his heart, was fear, fear of that which he saw. There was about her the same manner, the same intonation in her voice, now as then, but she was not what he had known her to be. He knew quite well what she had been for him. And gradually he was realizing that she was something quite other, and always had been. She put no covering on her head, merely took off her apron, saying, “We will go by the larches.” As they passed the old orchard, she called him in to show him a blue-tit’s nest in one of the apple trees, and a sycock’s in the hedge. He rather wondered at her surety, at a certain hardness like arrogance hidden under her humility. “Look at the apple buds,” she said, and he then perceived myriads of little scarlet balls among the drooping boughs. Watching his face, her eyes went hard. She saw the scales were fallen from him, and at last he was going to see her as she was. It was the thing she had most dreaded in the past, and most needed, for her soul’s sake. Now he was going to see her as she was. He would not love her, and he would know he never could have loved her. The old illusion gone, they were strangers, crude and entire. But he would give her her due—she would have her due from him. She was brilliant as he had not known her. She showed him nests: a jenny wren’s in a low bush. “See this jinty’s!” she exclaimed. He was surprised to hear her use the local name. She reached carefully through the thorns, and put her fingers in the nest’s round door. “Five!” she said. “Tiny little things.”