He did not stir, gazing up at her frankly admiring.  Sylvia made out, from the impression he evidently now had of her, that her face had really been very, very dirty; and at the recollection of that absurd ascent of the mountain by those two black-faced, twig-chewing individuals, a return of irrepressible laughter quivered on her lips.  Before his eyes, as swiftly, as unaccountably, as utterly as an April day shifts its moods, she had changed from radiant, rosy wood-goddess to saddened mortal and thence on into tricksy, laughing elf.  He burst out on her, “Who are you, anyhow?”

She remembered with a start.  “Why, that’s so, Molly didn’t mention my name—­isn’t that like Molly!  Why, I’m Sylvia Marshall,”

“You may be named Sylvia Marshall!” he said, leaving an inference in the air like incense.

“Well, yes, to be sure,” rejoined Sylvia; “I heard somebody only the other day say that an introduction was the quaintest of grotesques, since people’s names are the most—­”

He applied a label with precision.  “Oh, you know Morrison?”

She was startled at this abrupt emergence of the name which secretly filled her mind and was aware with exasperation that she was blushing.  Her companion appeared not to notice this.  He was attempting the difficult feat of wiping his face on the upper part of his sleeve, and said in the intervals of effort:  “Well, you know my name.  Molly didn’t forget that.”

“But I did,” Sylvia confessed.  “I was so excited by the fire I never noticed at all.  I’ve been racking my brains to remember, all the way up here.”

For some reason the man seemed quite struck with this statement and eyed her with keenness as he said:  “Oh—­really?  Well, my name is Austin Page.”  At the candid blankness of her face he showed a boyish flash of white teeth in a tanned face.  “Do you mean to say you’ve never heard of me?”

“Should I?” said Sylvia, with a graceful pretense of alarm.  “Do you write, or something?  Lay it to my ignorance.  It’s immense.”

He shook his head.  He smiled down on her.  She noticed now that his eyes were very kind as well as clear and keen.  “No, I don’t write, or anything.  There’s no reason why you should ever have heard of me.  I only thought—­I thought possibly Molly or Uncle George might have happened to mention me.”

“I’m only on from the West for a visit,” explained Sylvia.  “I never was in Lydford before.  I don’t know the people there.”

“Well then, to avoid Morrison’s strictures on introductions I’ll add to my name the information that I am thirty-two years old; a graduate of Columbia University; that I have some property in Colorado which gives me a great deal of trouble; and a farm with a wood lot in Vermont which is the joy of my heart.  I cannot endure politics; I play the flute, like my eggs boiled three minutes, and admire George Meredith.”

His manoeuvers with his sleeve were so preposterous that Sylvia now cried to him:  “Oh, don’t twist around that way.  You’ll give yourself a crick in the neck.  Here’s my handkerchief.  We were going to share that, anyhow.”