The road was shrouded and overhung by branches.  There was a kind of translucent light, enough to see her face, but I kept my eyes on the ground.  I was vexed.  Now that it was past the episode appeared to be a lost opportunity.  We were to part in a moment, and her rare mental gifts and her unfamiliar, but very vivid, beauty made the idea of parting intensely disagreeable.  She had filled me with a curiosity that she had done nothing whatever to satisfy, and with a fascination that was very nearly a fear.  We mounted the hill and came out on a stretch of soft common sward.  Then the sound of our footsteps ceased and the world grew more silent than ever.  There were little enclosed fields all round us.  The moon threw a wan light, and gleaming mist hung in the ragged hedges.  Broad, soft roads ran away into space on every side.

“And now ...”  I asked, at last, “shall we ever meet again?” My voice came huskily, as if I had not spoken for years and years.

“Oh, very often,” she answered.

“Very often?” I repeated.  I hardly knew whether I was pleased or dismayed.  Through the gate-gap in a hedge, I caught a glimmer of a white house front.  It seemed to belong to another world; to another order of things.

“Ah ... here is Callan’s,” I said.  “This is where I was going....”

“I know,” she answered; “we part here.”

“To meet again?” I asked.

“Oh ... to meet again; why, yes, to meet again.”

CHAPTER TWO

Her figure faded into the darkness, as pale things waver down into deep water, and as soon as she disappeared my sense of humour returned.  The episode appeared more clearly, as a flirtation with an enigmatic, but decidedly charming, chance travelling companion.  The girl was a riddle, and a riddle once guessed is a very trivial thing.  She, too, would be a very trivial thing when I had found a solution.  It occurred to me that she wished me to regard her as a symbol, perhaps, of the future—­as a type of those who are to inherit the earth, in fact.  She had been playing the fool with me, in her insolent modernity.  She had wished me to understand that I was old-fashioned; that the frame of mind of which I and my fellows were the inheritors was over and done with.  We were to be compulsorily retired; to stand aside superannuated.  It was obvious that she was better equipped for the swiftness of life.  She had a something—­not only quickness of wit, not only ruthless determination, but a something quite different and quite indefinably more impressive.  Perhaps it was only the confidence of the superseder, the essential quality that makes for the empire of the Occidental.  But I was not a negro—­not even relatively a Hindoo.  I was somebody, confound it, I was somebody.

As an author, I had been so uniformly unsuccessful, so absolutely unrecognised, that I had got into the way of regarding myself as ahead of my time, as a worker for posterity.  It was a habit of mind—­the only revenge that I could take upon despiteful Fate.  This girl came to confound me with the common herd—­she declared herself to be that very posterity for which I worked.