“We none of us know each other.” Her outstretched hand rested on his plain basket sword-hilt. “You might surprise me a hundred ways, and I you. When you are absent from me, so many things I should like to say rise in my mind; when you come, you bring a barrier with you that makes speech impossible.” Luc’s hazel eyes darkened; with his ungloved right hand he raised hers from the steel shell of his sword. “You see, Monsieur,” she added proudly, “that I admit to thinking of you.” She rose, leaving her hand in his. They were of a height, and he looked straight into her face, which was fully illuminated by the strong beams of the sun. He could see the fine lines round her large, misty eyes, the red powder rubbed into her cheeks, and the veins showing under the dark skin of the hollow temples and thin throat. Her thick lashes and slender brows were artificially darkened; the sun showed the bluish look of the pencil round the heavy lids. He noticed that her hand was very cold in his. “You are different indeed!” she exclaimed, with a certain bitterness. “Different?” he asked. She withdrew her hand. “From all of them!” She appeared to be struggling with some excitement or agitation. “What is in your mind? Where are you going? What do you mean to do? You will have to use the world as you find it--like every one else.” Luc smiled. “I am so exactly the same as every one else, Madame,” he said, in a deprecating tone. “I am just struggling for some little sphere in which I can let my soul spread its wings--I have that restlessness to achieve something which many better men lack,” he added, thinking of his father and Joseph; “yet I dare not profane it, for it is the highest thing I know.” He fixed his eyes on her gravely, and she moved towards the wallflowers, away from him. “I wish I had left you alone,” she said. Luc flushed swiftly. “Have you found me so ungrateful?” “You have nothing to be grateful for,” she replied, narrowing her eyes on him, “I only fear that some day you may come to dislike me.” She had not said or done anything to destroy the mental image he cherished of a slightly mysterious creature, fiery and pure, disdainful of the world and at heart tender and a little sad; he therefore smiled at her words, which he thought showed her ignorance of his conception of her, and looked at her with his serene, enthusiastic glance, before which her dark eyes fell. “You are very sure of your own creeds,” she said irrelevantly, “and narrow too, at the best--I think.” He admitted to not following her thought, and she answered his admission by a half-scornful, half-terrified little laugh. “Do you really not understand me?” she asked.