“Brides?” the voice echoed, with a lilt of girlish laughter running through the words.  “You mean ‘bribes,’ don’t you?  For I assure you, dear cousin, it is the metallic clink of American gold, and nothing else, that lures your great men over the sea.  As for my silence, ma belle, I have been uncommunicative because there really seemed nothing at all worth saying.  I can’t accustom myself to small-talk—­I can’t even listen to it patiently.  I always feel a wild impulse to fly far, far away, where I can close my ears to it all and listen to my own thoughts.  I’m sorry if I disappoint you, Alice—­I seem to disappoint everybody that I would like to please—­but I assure you, laugh at my dreams as you may, to me my dream-life is far more attractive and beautiful than what you term Life.  Forgive me if I hurt you, cousin.  I’m peculiarly constituted, perhaps, but I don’t like this twaddle, and I can’t help it!  Everything in England is so beautiful, and yet its society seems so—­so hopelessly unsatisfactory to one who longs to live!”

“To live, Opal?  We are not dead, surely!  What do you mean by life?”

And so her name was Opal!  How curiously the name suited the voice!  The Boy, as he listened, felt that no other name could possibly have matched that voice—­the opal, that glorious gem in which all the fires of the sun, the iridescent glories of the rainbow, and the cold brilliance of ice and frost and snow seemed to blend and crystallize.  All this, and more, was in that mysteriously fascinating voice.

“To live, Alice?” echoed the voice again.  “To live?  Why, to live is to feel!—­to feel every emotion of which the human soul is capable, to rise to the heights of love, and knowledge, and power; to sink—­if need be—­to the deepest depths of despair, but, at all costs, at all hazards, to live!—­to experience in one’s own nature all the reality and fullness of the deathless emotions of life!”

The voice sank almost to the softness of a whisper, yet even then was vibrant, alive, intense.

“Ah, Alice, from my childhood up, I have dreamed of life and longed for it.  What life really is, each must decide for himself, must he not?  Some, they say, sleep their way through a dreamless existence, and never, never wake to realities.  Alice, I have sometimes wondered if that was to be my fate, have wondered and wondered until I have cried out in real terror at the hideous prospect!  Surely Fate could not be so cruel as to implant such a desperate desire in a soul that never was to know its fulfilment.  Could it, Alice?  Tell me, could it?”

The Boy held his breath now.

Who was this girl, anyhow, who seemed to express his own thoughts as accurately as he himself could have done?  He was bored no longer.  He was roused, stirred, awakened—­and intensely interested.  It was as though the voice of his own soul spoke to him in a dream.

The cold, lifeless voice now chimed in again.  In his impatience the Boy clenched his fists and shut his teeth together hard.  Why didn’t she keep still?  He didn’t want to miss a single note he might have caught of the voice—­that other!  Why did this nonentity—­for one didn’t have to see her to be sure that she was that—­have to interrupt and rob him of his pleasure?