She wandered off up into the remoter parts of The Mountain, that day, after their return.  No one saw just where she went,—­indeed, no one knew its forest-recesses and rocky fastnesses as she did.  She was gone until late at night; and when Old Sophy, who had watched for her, bound up her long hair for her sleep, it was damp with the cold dews.

The old black woman looked at her without speaking, but questioning her with every feature as to the sorrow that was weighing on her.

Suddenly she turned to Old Sophy.

“You want to know what there is troubling me,” she said.  “Nobody loves me.  I cannot love anybody.  What is love, Sophy?”

“It’s what poor ol’ Sophy’s got for her Elsie,” the old woman answered.  “Tell me, darlin’,—­don’ you love somebody?—­don’ you love——? you know,—­oh, tell me, darlin’, don’ you love to see the gen’l’man that keeps up at the school where you go?  They say he’s the pootiest gen’l’man that was ever in the town here.  Don’ be ‘fraid of poor Ol’ Sophy, darlin’,—­she loved a man once,—­see here!  Oh, I’ve showed you this often enough!”

She took from her pocket a half of one of the old Spanish silver coins, such as were current in the earlier part of this century.  The other half of it had been lying in the deep sea-sand for more than fifty years.

Elsie looked her in the face, but did not answer in words.  What strange intelligence was that which passed between them through the diamond eyes and the little beady black ones?—­what subtile intercommunication, penetrating so much deeper than articulate speech?  This was the nearest approach to sympathetic relations that Elsie ever had:  a kind of dumb intercourse of feeling, such as one sees in the eyes of brute mothers looking on their young.  But, subtile as it was, it was narrow and individual; whereas an emotion which can shape itself in language opens the gate for itself into the great community of human affections; for every word we speak is the medal of a dead thought or feeling, struck in the die of some human experience, worn smooth by innumerable contacts, and always transferred warm from one to another.  By words we share the common consciousness of the race, which has shaped itself in these symbols.  By music we reach those special states of consciousness which, being without form, cannot be shaped with the mosaics of the vocabulary.  The language of the eyes runs deeper into the personal nature, but it is purely individual, and perishes in the expression.  If we consider them all as growing out of the consciousness as their root, language is the leaf, music is the flower; but when the eyes meet and search each other, it is the uncovering of the blanched stem through which the whole life runs, but which has never taken color or form from the sunlight.