John Penhallow stood a moment, and then said, “Good gracious!  Leila, your eyes are blue.”  It was true.  When big eyes are wide open staring up at the comrade blue of the deep blue sky, they win a certain beauty of added colour like little quiet lakelets under the azure sky when no wind disturbs their power of reflecting capture.

“Oh, John, and didn’t you know my eyes were blue?” She spoke with languid interest in the fact he announced.

“But,” he said, looking down at her as he stood, “they’re so—­so very blue.”

“Oh, all the Greys have blue eyes.”

He laughed gentle laughter and dropped on the pine-needles of the forest floor.  The spring lay between them.  He felt, as she did not, the charm of the stillness.  He wanted to find words in which to put his desire for expression.  She broke into his mood of imaginative seekings.

“How cold it is,” she said, gathering the water in the cup of her hand, and then with both hands did better and got a refreshing drink.

“That makes a better cup,” he said.  “Let us follow the water to the river.”

“It never gets there.  It runs into Lonesome Man’s swamp, and that’s the end of him.”

“Who, Lonesome Man or the spring?  And who was Lonesome Man?”

“Nobody knows.  What does it matter?”

He watched her toy with the new-born rill, a mere thread of water, build a Lilliputian dam, and muddle the clear outflow as it broke, and then build again.  He had the thought that she had suddenly become younger, more like a child, and he himself older.

“Why don’t you talk, John?” she said.

“I can’t.  I am wondering about that Lonesome Man and what the trees are thinking.  Don’t you feel how still it is?  It’s disrespectful to gabble before your betters.”  He felt it and said it without affectation, but as usual his mood of wandering thought failed to interest Leila.

“I hate it when it’s quiet!  I like to hear the wind howl in the pines—­”

He expressed his annoyance.  “You never want to talk anything but horses and swimming.  Wait till you come back next spring with long skirts—­such a nice well-behaved Miss Grey.”  He was, in familiar phrase, out of sorts, with a bit of will to annoy a disappointing companion.  His mild effort had no success.

“Oh, John, it’s awful!  You ought to be sorry for me.  The more you grow up the more your skirts grow down.  Bother their manners!  Who cares!  Let’s go home.  It feels just as if it was Sunday.”

“It is, in the woods.  Well, come along.”  He walked on in the silence, she thinking of that alarming prospect of school, and he of the escaped slave’s secret and, what struck the boy most—­the hawk.  Never before had he been told anything which was to be sacredly guarded from others.  It gave him now a pleasant feeling of having been trusted.  Suppose Leila had been told such a thing, how would she feel, and Aunt Ann?  He was like a man who has too large a deposit in a doubtful bank.  He was vaguely uneasy lest he might tell or in some way betray his sense of possessing a person’s confidence.