It was so easy to talk to her. To Edwin, indeed, it seemed as if he had now become articulate for the first time in his life. She did not speak very much of herself; but she asked him many questions about his life at school, where, he confided to her, he had first known Griffin, and then again about his new work in North Bromwich. And when she did speak her voice was low, and her speech, to his ears, of an amazing limpid purity, more beautiful than any human speech he had ever heard. Edwin would have liked to listen to it for ever. He felt that he wanted words to describe its peculiar music, but no words came to him. He could only remember a line in Browning’s _Pauline_:— “Her voice was as the voice of his own soul Heard in the calm of thought. . . .” That was the nearest he could get to it; but the words, although they expressed a little of his absorption, did not convey the musical qualities that he wanted to describe. He tried to compare it with the tones of some instrument that he knew, but neither wood-wind nor strings suggested what he wanted. No . . . it was a sound nearer to nature than any man-made instrument. It was the voice of a Naiad: the sound of running water in a clear brookland. And all the time that he listened to her he was thrillingly conscious of her physical presence. She was sitting on the stair beneath him, and fortunately she could not see that he was gazing at her in the gloom, thinking how beautifully shaped was the nape of the neck from which her dark hair was drawn upwards; overcome by the loveliness and smoothness of her curved shoulder. “I’m talking all the time,” he said, “and you’re saying nothing. It’s rather a shame . . . because you speak so beautifully.” “Whatever do you mean?” For a moment her eyes were on his. He dared not look at them. He could not answer her, for the moment seemed full of such an overpowering sweetness. “Do tell me.” “Oh, I only mean that when you say a thing like that, it . . . it suggests that everything about you is marvellously clean and clear and musical—” He paused, for he felt that she might laugh at him. “Yes . . . go on,” she said. “Like water in a hill country. It makes me feel as if I weren’t within a hundred miles of North Bromwich.” She laughed softly, but not unkindly. “No, I’m not a bit like that. I’m really awfully hard and worldly—I wish I were the least bit what you imagine. You’re most awfully young, aren’t you?” Perhaps she did not mean the word cruelly, but it seemed very cruel to Edwin. It was quite possible that she was a few years older than himself, if age were to be counted by years; but in reality he knew that she was beautifully young, certainly young enough to love and to be loved. “Don’t let’s talk about me,” she said. “But I want to talk about you.”