“You’re comin’ to it nicely,” she called down to him.  “It feels funny to start with, but in the end you’ll a’most get to like it.”

“I do like it.”

She considered for a while.

“If that’s so,” she said, “you ‘d better strip all over an’ ’ave done with it.  I was bringin’ you to it gradual.”

“But—­”

“Oh, that’s all right.  I knows my manners.  Be quick as you can, so’s not to catch cold, an’ I’ll take a stroll up the bank an’ give a call if anyone’s comin’.”

She scrambled back to firm ground and set off for a saunter up stream, pausing here to reach for a nut, there to pluck a ripe blackberry, and again to examine a tangle of bryony, or the deep-red fruit of the honey-suckle; for almost all her waking life had been spent in towns among crowds, and these things were new and strange to her.  She met no one on her way until, where the stream twisted between a double fold of green pasture slopes, she came to the mill—­a tall rickety building, with a tiled roof that time had darkened and greened with lichens, and a tall wheel turning slowly in a splash of water, and bright water dancing over a weir below.  In the doorway leaned a middle-aged man, powdered all over with white, even to the eyelids.  He caught sight of her, and she was afraid he would be angry, and warn her off for trespassing; but he nodded and called out something in a friendly manner—­“Good day,” perhaps.  She could not hear the words for the hum of the weir and the roaring of the machinery within the building.

It was time to retrace her steps, and she went back leisurably, peering for trout and plucking on the way a trail of the bryony, berried with orange and scarlet and yellow and palest green, to exhibit to Arthur Miles.  She found him seated on the near bank, close beside her hazel-mote.  He did not hear her barefooted approach, being absorbed in the movements of a wagtail that had come down to the pebbly spit for its bath; and Tilda started scolding forthwith.  For he sat there naked to the waist, with his shirt spread to dry on the grass.  He had given it a thorough soaping, and washed it and wrung it out:  his stockings too.

“You’ll catch yer death!” threatened Tilda.

But he was not shivering—­so blandly fell the sun’s rays, and so gently played the breeze.

“I can’t make you out,” she confessed.  “First when I came on yer—­an’ that was on’y yestiddy—­you was like a thing afraid o’ yer own shadder.  An’ now you don’t appear to mind nothin’—­not even the chance o’ bein’ found an’ took back.”

The boy drew a long breath.

“You’re shakin’ with cold, though.  There!  What did I tell yer?” But a moment later she owned herself mistaken.  He was not cold at all.

“It’s all so—­so good,” he murmured, more to himself than to her.

“What’s good?”

He reached out for the trail of bryony in her lap and fingered it wonderingly, without speaking for a while.  Then, lifting his hand, he laid it for a moment against her upper arm—­the lightest touch—­no more.