“But not one good comrade, one who liked the same sort of thing?”

“So few people really do.  It would have to be somebody who wouldn’t talk when I wanted to listen to the wind, or wouldn’t mind my not talking—­and yet who wouldn’t mind my talking either, if I took a sudden notion.”  She began to laugh at her own fancy, with the low, rich note which delighted his ear afresh every time he heard it.  “Comrades who are tolerant of one’s every mood are not common, are they?  Mr. Kendrick, what do you suppose those dots of bright scarlet are, halfway down the hill?  They must be rose haws, mustn’t they?  Nothing else could have that colour in November.”

“I don’t know what ‘rose haws’ are.  Do you want them—­whatever they are?  I’ll go and get them for you.”

“I’ll go, too, to see if they’re worth picking.  They’re thorny things; you won’t like them, but I do.”

“You think I don’t like thorny things?” he asked her as they went down the hillside, up which Ted and Ruth were now struggling.  It was steep and he held out his hand to her, but she ignored it and went on with sure, light feet.

“No, I think you like them soft and rounded.”

“And you prefer them prickly?”

“Prickly enough to be interesting.”

They reached the scraggly rosebush, bare except for the bright red haws, their smooth hard surfaces shining in the sun.  Richard got out his knife, and by dint of scratching his hands in a dozen places, succeeded in gathering quite a cluster.  Then he went to work at getting rid of the thorns.

“You may like things prickly, but you’ll be willing to spare a few of these,” he observed.

He succeeded in time in pruning the cluster into subordination, bound them with a tough bit of dried weed which he found at his feet, and held out the bunch.  “Will you do me the honour of wearing them?”

She thrust the smooth stems into the breast of her riding-coat, where they gave the last picturesque touch to her attire.  “Thank you,” she acknowledged somewhat tardily.  “I can do no less after seeing you scarify yourself in my service.  You might have put on your gloves.”

“I might—­and suffered your scarifying mirth, which would have been much worse.  ‘He jests at scars that never felt a wound,’ but he who jests at them after he has felt them is the hero.  Observe that I still jest.”  He put his lips to a bleeding tear on his wrist as he spoke.  “My only regret is that the rose haws were not where they are now when I photographed the horses.  Only, mine is not a colour camera.  I must get one and have it with me when I drive, in case of emergencies like this one.”

A whimsical expression touching his lips, he gazed off over the landscape as he spoke, and she glanced at his profile.  She was obliged to admit to herself that she had seldom noted one of better lines.  Curiously enough, to her observation there did not lack a suggestion of ruggedness about his face, in spite of the soft and easy life she understood him to have led.