“I see them so,” she said, pointing with a grass stem, “white, green, yellow, red, purple, and when people are angry or bad, black across the red—as you were just now.” “Who told you anything about it—in the beginning?” I demanded. “About the colours? No one. I used to ask what colours were when I was little—in table-covers and curtains and carpets, you see—because some colours hurt me and some made me happy. People told me; and when I got older that was how I saw people.” Again she traced the outline of the Egg which it is given to very few of us to see. “All by yourself?” I repeated. “All by myself. There wasn’t anyone else. I only found out afterwards that other people did not see the Colours.” She leaned against the tree-hole plaiting and unplaiting chance-plucked grass stems. The children in the wood had drawn nearer. I could see them with the tail of my eye frolicking like squirrels. “Now I am sure you will never laugh at me,” she went on after a long silence. “Nor at _them_.” “Goodness! No!” I cried, jolted out of my train of thought. “A man who laughs at a child—unless the child is laughing too—is a heathen!” “I didn’t mean that of course. You’d never laugh _at_ children, but I thought—I used to think—that perhaps you might laugh about _them_. So now I beg your pardon…. What are you going to laugh at?” I had made no sound, but she knew. “At the notion of your begging my pardon. If you had done your duty as a pillar of the state and a landed proprietress you ought to have summoned me for trespass when I barged through your woods the other day. It was disgraceful of me—inexcusable.” She looked at me, her head against the tree trunk—long and steadfastly—this woman who could see the naked soul. “How curious,” she half whispered. “How very curious.” “Why, what have I done?” “You don’t understand … and yet you understood about the Colours. Don’t you understand?” She spoke with a passion that nothing had justified, and I faced her bewilderedly as she rose. The children had gathered themselves in a roundel behind a bramble bush. One sleek head bent over something smaller, and the set of the little shoulders told me that fingers were on lips. They, too, had some child’s tremendous secret. I alone was hopelessly astray there in the broad sunlight. “No,” I said, and shook my head as though the dead eyes could note. “Whatever it is, I don’t understand yet. Perhaps I shall later—if you’ll let me come again.” “You will come again,” she answered. “You will surely come again and walk in the wood.” “Perhaps the children will know me well enough by that time to let me play with them—as a favour. You know what children are like.”