She gazed at him, at the narrow sloping shoulders and the shining curly head. She felt very much a woman at the moment--years older than the handful of months which at most must separate them. She laid her cheek against his and slid her arm about him. “I'm so glad you're not a man.” He stared straight before him. “I shall be soon.” “How old are you?” “Sixteen next birthday.” She drew him nearer to her. He was so young as that! “How old d'you think I am?” He searched her face, trying to make her as near his own age as possible, and not to be mistaken. “Sixteen?” he suggested. “Almost seventeen,” she said; “I'll soon be twenty, And then----” “And then,” he interrupted, “I'll be eighteen--almost a man.” She withdrew her face from his. “Stupid. I don't want you to be a man. When you're a man, I shan't like you; you'll become hard and masterful like... like the rest.” “I shan't.” She relented. “No. I don't think you will. But then it'll be all different.” Yes, it would all be different. Peter had been a child when, in the early summer, he had stumbled on the Happy Cottage. Until then he would have been perfectly contented to have gone on living at Topbury and to have been fifteen forever. It had scarcely occurred to him that childhood was a preparation which would soon be ended. He had never looked ahead--never realized that he, with all the generations of boys who had lived before him, must one day be a man. In a vague way he had known that once his father and mother had been young and protected, as he and Kay were young and protected. But it had seemed a fanciful legend. And now the great change, which formerly he would have dreaded, he yearned for. The ignorance and inexperience of being young, the habit grown people had of treating him as a person of no serious importance, galled him. It had begun with the Faun Man and his desire to be like him. It was ridiculous when he imagined his own appearance, but he wanted to be respected. These longings had not come home to him before--they had been a gradual growth of weeks and months. It was contact with a vitalizing personality that had done it, and listening to talks of strange lands and the doings of strong men. And now this girl----. To her he was no more than amusing. She could do and say to him things that she would never do or say to men. Yes, when he was older it would all be different. She had wakened him forever from the long and irrecoverable sleep of childhood. He might dose again, but he could never sink back into its deep unruffled calm and indifference. Was it this that the river had tried to tell him, when he had heard it singing, “Turn back, turn back, turn back”? It still sang, going round the white feet of the girl in little waves and eddies, but its voice was indistinct, like that of an old prophet, who mumbles a forgotten and disregarded message. The girl at his side stirred. “What do they call you?”