After a time she disappeared again.  Bennington stood still, waiting for some new prank, but he waited in vain.  He instituted a search, but the search was fruitless.  He called, but received no reply.  At last he made his way again to the dell in which they had lunched, and there he found her, flat on her back, looking at the little summer clouds through wide-open eyes.

Her mood appeared to have changed.  Indeed that seemed to be characteristic of her; that her lightness was not so much the lightness of thistle down, which is ever airy, the sport of every wind, but rather that of the rose vine, mobile and swaying in every breeze, yet at the same time rooted well in the wholesome garden earth.  She cared now to be silent.  In a little while Bennington saw that she had fallen asleep.  For the first time he looked upon her face in absolute repose.

Feature by feature, line by line, he went over it, and into his heart crept that peculiar yearning which seems, on analysis, half pity for what has past and half fear for what may come.  It is bestowed on little children, and on those whose natures, in spite of their years, are essentially childlike.  For this girl’s face was so pathetically young.  Its sensitive lips pouted with a child’s pout, its pointed chin was delicate with the delicacy that is lost when the teeth have had often to be clenched in resolve; its cheek was curved so softly, its long eyelashes shaded that cheek so purely.  Yet somewhere, like an intangible spirit which dwelt in it, unseen except through its littlest effects, Bennington seemed to trace that subtle sadness, or still more subtle mystery, which at times showed so strongly in her eyes.  He caught himself puzzling over it, trying to seize it.  It was most like a sorrow, and yet like a sorrow which had been outlived.  Or, if a mystery, it was as a mystery which was such only to others, no longer to herself.  The whole line of thought was too fine-drawn for Bennington’s untrained perceptions.  Yet again, all at once, he realized that this very fact was one of the girl’s charms to him; that her mere presence stirred in him perceptions, intuitions, thoughts—­yes, even powers—­which he had never known before.  He felt that she developed him.  He found that instead of being weak he was merely latent; that now the latent perceptions were unfolding.  Since he had known her he had felt himself more of a man, more ready to grapple with facts and conditions on his own behalf, more inclined to take his own view of the world and to act on it.  She had given him independence, for she had made him believe in himself, and belief in one’s self is the first principle of independence.  Bennington de Laney looked back on his old New York self as on a being infinitely remote.

She awoke and opened her eyes slowly, and looked at him without blinking.  The sun had gone nearly to the ridge top, and a Wilson’s thrush was celebrating with his hollow notes the artificial twilight of its shadow.