of snowflakes?  And was not she herself a fighter of windmills?  To her Romance could not come in too brightly-coloured garb, and so her Romance wove a net about him.  Sometimes it flattered:  sometimes it amused:  sometimes it gave a sense of kinship that made him think that, unless she were a liar she would never have so sympathized with him.  He was unable to trace the fine distinction in veracity between describing a perfectly fictitious operation performed by oneself, and in recounting the messages given by the screaming gulls, the whining winds on Lashnagar.

On one or two things she was certainly caught up sharp.  His taste in books showed a width of divergence between them that nothing could ever bridge; seeing her with “Fruit Gathering” which the schoolmaster had lent to her, he asked what it was.

“It’s by Tagore,” she ventured.

“Tagore?  Never heard of him,” he said dismissively.

In the fly-leaf of the book was a beautiful portrait of Tagore.  She showed it to him, remarking that he was the Bengali poet.

“Oh, a nigger!” he cried contemptuously, pushing the book on one side.  She frowned at him and shyly suggested that Christ, in that case, shared Tagore’s disadvantage.  He laughed loudly.  Then she opened the book at random.  She had been impressed with something before going to bed the night before.

“Listen to this, Louis.  I thought I’d like to read it to you,” she said, and read, “’Let me not pray to be sheltered from dangers, but to be fearless in facing them.  And this—­listen, ’Let me not look for allies in life’s fight, but to my own strength’; and here’s the best bit of all, ’Grant me that I may not be a coward, feeling your mercy in my success alone; but let me find the grasp of your hand in my failure.’  I wish so much I could have found that before father died and read it to him.”

“Oh—­poetry,” he said contemptuously; “a lot of high falutin’ nonsense—­and by a nigger too!  What’s that someone said?  ’Intoxicated with the exuberance of his own verbosity.’  That’s a good description of a poet.”

Another time she spoke of St. Brigid, the Bride of Christ.

“Who’s she?” he asked contemptuously.

“The Irish saint.”  He interrupted with a long tirade against Home Rule which proved, to his satisfaction, that St. Brigid was also “high-falutin’ nonsense.”  A pamphlet of Shaw’s she found in the saloon he told her not, on any account, to read.

“A damned Socialist—­a vegetarian—­a faddist,” he said excitedly, and she led the conversation away from books, though he brought it back several times to explain to her the jokes in “Punch” which he said would have to be put into her head with a hammer and chisel, since she was a Scot.

But in spite of puzzlement and divergences she was intensely happy.  After the solitude of Lashnagar every day was full of thrilled interest to her.  The many people, the changes of temperature as the boat went south, the shoals of porpoises tumbling in the blue water; the strange foods, the passing ships were all amazements to her and the fact that her thoughts had, for the first time, found a tangible resting-place like homing pigeons alighting at their cot, together with her absorption in Louis, all gave her a sense of security.