The great boulders were as before but less mysterious, if one could believe a recent theory that they had been dropped there by a universal glacier that had once covered all this part of the world with an ocean of ice, whose slowly ebbing tide would flow back again perhaps and cover all of man’s ambitious monuments. He squeezed through a strait Cyclopean gateway of rock, and the little green pond lay before him, still thick with submerged grasses, still oversprinkled with curled autumn leaves. He gazed at the spot where he had beaten Jud Lasher and used him as a flail. He quivered with a nausea for that whole chapter in his life, and was glad that his swinging glance discovered no other human presence. But as he was about to back through the narrow crevice between the stones, he heard a voice floating above his head in the air, a girl’s voice, as liquid and as sweetly murmurous as the voice should have been of the nymph that should have haunted this viridescent pool. It was very mournful and it said: “All night I was reading the book you lent me. _The Lady of the Lake!_ Such a long beautiful story, and so sad! What a sad thing love is, and how old! So many of us poor lovers have loved in vain—haven’t we, honey? They’ll tell us that we’re too young to love, but oh, darling, darling, I feel so old, so old! And how can I ever stand the years that must go by before we can be together? You’ve got to finish your college and make your way. I’d rather die than hinder you from being the great man you’re going to be. And I can’t help you. I’m so poor and friendless and ignorant. “But when I think, when I think of the years, the years, the years, I want to lie down in that water there and fold my hands and drown. For even when you are rich and famous—what would your father and mother say if you told them that you wanted to marry me? Your father is rich and famous and everybody respects him. I’m just one of the Lashers.” The boy had the RoBards talent for silence and he had listened as quietly as his hidden father. Even now he only mumbled: “I’ll marry you or nobody, Aletta. This is a free country!” An eerie laugh broke from the girl’s throat as she cried: “A free country! How could there be a free country anywhere? Least of all here?” RoBards was grimly glad that she had sanity enough to understand this truth at least and the wildness of his boy’s infatuation. To marry the impossible sister of the unspeakable wretch that his own father had put to death—that would be impossible; if anything were. He risked discovery and leaned out to have a look at this weird creature whose voice had woven such unholy power about his son.