She sat down a short distance from him, and flicked her skirt over her feet. She had bound back her hair over her neck in rich and ample clusters. Her blouse was still open at the throat. “Do you live here?” “At Saltire. And you?” “With my father, on the hills above Rilchester. Are you twenty yet?” Gabriel smiled in such fashion that her eyes echoed his. “I am older than you are,” he said. “Much?” “You are illogical; how should I know?” “You do not look older; I am twenty. I like your face; you have gray eyes, so have I. I like your hair, too; it is dark and shines in the sun. What shall we talk about?” “As we have begun.” “Our ages?” “Ourselves, rather.” “I never talk about myself.” “Why not?” “I never have any one to talk to.” The sense that he had passed back to childhood seized upon Gabriel with intense vividness. An artificial intellectuality appeared to have fallen from his being. The rust of experience no longer roughened his soul. He faced his deeper self, and the impression startled him. His manhood seemed to untrammel itself from the intricacies of world-wise philosophy; and he stood in the sun. “You are lonely?” he said, with a sympathetic flexion of voice. Her face brightened with a peculiarly luminous look, and her eyes held his. “No.” “You have friends?” “None.” “Strange.” “Is it?” “I imagine so. Even the most reserved being possesses some one he can call a friend. Perhaps you are jealous of conferring the epithet.” “What epithet?” “Friend.” “My father does not believe in friends.” “No?” “He says they are too expensive.” Gabriel smiled, but the girl’s face was unceasingly solemn. Her expression, indeed, appeared to partake of the perpetual seriousness of an earnest nature. A calm, unconscious melancholy shone forth from her mind like a glimmer of sunlight reflected from some golden shrine. “Your father must be something of a cynic.” “My father is poor.” “Only in gold, perhaps.” “In mind, too,” she said, with transcendent and ingenuous candor. “But you love him?” “I do not know,” she retorted, with a certain contemplative sincerity. “I have only read of love. I know Britomart and Florimel. I do not think Britomart would have loved my father.” “Why not?” “I do not know.” “Perhaps I ought not to ask you.” They lapsed suddenly into silence. The girl with the gray eyes was looking afar into the shadows of the woods. The water murmured at their feet, a calm, unceasing monologue like the soft prattle of a mother. The silence proved but a prelude to one of the girl’s strange and flashing interrogations of the enigmas of life. “Do you believe in a God?” she said. “You ask strange questions.” “Do I?” “Yes.”