And yet Opal Ledoux had much on her mind just then.  The Boy had read the signs upon her face correctly.  She was troubled.

For a long time they sat together, and looking far out over the vast expanse of dancing blueness, they spoke of life—­and the living of it.  And both knew so little of either!

It was a strange talk for the first one—­so subtly intimate, with its flashes of personality and freedom from conventions, that it seemed like a meeting of old friends, rather than of strangers.  Some intimacies are like the oak, long and steady of growth; others spring to full maturity in an hour’s time.  And these two had bridged the space of years in a few moments of converse.  They understood each other so well.

This same idea occurred to them simultaneously, as she looked up at him with eyes glowing with a quick appreciation of some well-expressed and worthy thought.  Something within him stirred to sudden life—­something that no one else had ever reached.

He looked into her eyes and thought he had never looked into the eyes of a woman before.  She smiled—­and he was sure it was the first time he had ever seen a woman smile!

“I am wild to be at home again,” she was saying, “fairly crazy for America!  How I love her big, broad, majestic acres—­the splendid sweep of her meadows—­the massive grandeur of her mountain peaks—­the glory of her open skies!  You too, I believe, are a wanderer on strange seas.  You can hardly fail to understand my longing for the homeland!”

“I do understand, Opal.  I am on my first visit to your country.  Tell me of her—­her institutions, her people!  Believe me, I am greatly interested!”

And he was—­in her!  Nothing else counted at that moment.  But the girl did not understand that—­then!

For half an hour, perhaps, she lost herself in an eloquent eulogy of America, while the Boy sat and watched her, catching the import of but little that she said, it must be confessed, but drinking in every detail of her expressive countenance, her flashing, lustrous eyes, her red, impulsive lips and rounded form, and her white, slender hands, always employed in the expression of a thought or as the outlet for some passing emotion.  He caught himself watching for the occasional glimpses of her small white teeth between the rose of her lips.  He saw in her eyes the violet sparks of smouldering fires, kindled by the volcanic heart sometimes throbbing and threatening so close to the surface.  When the eruption came!—­Fascinated he watched the rise and sweep of her white arm.  Every line and curve of her body was full of suggestion of the ardent and restless and impulsive temperament with which nature had so lavishly endowed her.  She was alive with feeling—­alive to the finger-tips with the joy of life, the fullness of a deep, emotional nature.

It occurred to Paul that nature had purposely left her body so small, albeit so beautifully rounded, that it might devote all its powers to the building therein of a magnificent, flaming soul—­that her inner nature might always triumph.  But Opal had never been especially conscious of a soul—­scarcely of a body.  She had not yet found herself.