“Indeed, you are absolutely different from anybody else.”  And then, terrified, I turned red.

“Oh, I know!  You didn’t mean it either as a brick-bat or a bouquet, merely the truth as you see it.  You are transparently truthful, fundamentally truthful, and at the same time the American business woman!  You can’t understand how that intrigues me!”

And then, quite simply and boyishly, he began to talk about himself.  I got glimpses of a boyhood spent partly in a stately home in Vienna, and partly roaming about the great Hungarian estate which his mother loved, and to which the two returned summer after summer, until her death.  Then student days, and after that, foot-loose wanderings up and down the earth and across the seven seas.

His grandmother had dropped courtesies to kings; and mine had dropped “aitches.”  His father had been a European celebrity, mine a ship-chandler in Boston, U.S.A.  Yet here we two were; and he might have been a high-spirited and most beautiful little boy picnicking with a sedate and old-maidish little girl.

“How old should you imagine me?” he flung the question like a challenge, as if he had divined my thoughts.

“Oh, say, thirteen, going on fourteen.”

“Dear Woman-in-the-Woods, I am thirty-three.”

“You are older than I thought.”

“You are younger than you think.  And you betray the fact,” he smiled.

“I have never been very young; probably I shall never be very old.”

“You will always be exactly the right age,” said Nicholas Jelnik.  “For you will always be a little girl, and a young maiden, and a grown woman, and a bit of an old maid, and something of a grandmother.  That is a wonderful, a very, very wonderful combination!”

I looked at him with more than doubt.  But no, he was not poking fun, though the rich color had come into his cheek, and the golden lights flickered mischievously in his eyes.

“And I forgot to add, also a business woman!” he finished gaily. “Herr Gott, but it took a business woman to tackle old Hynds House and gather together such folks as you have there now!”

“Alicia was the head and front of that.  I merely helped.”

“Alicia,” said Mr. Jelnik, “is a darling girl.  Alicia is everything a girl ought to be.”  But there was not in eyes or voice that light and tone that crept into Doctor Richard’s when he named her.  My dear girl’s tender face—­so true and beautiful and loving—­rose before me, and all she had meant to me, been to me, crowded upon my heart.  I said what I had never intended to say to any one: 

“Why, Alicia’s my—­my child, to me!  Don’t you understand?”

“Dear Woman, yes!” His voice was melted gold.

The ridiculous little brook went whish-whis-sssh; and the bluish shadows melted into gray; and a chill came creeping, creeping, into the air.

“Before you go,” said Nicholas Jelnik, “I should like to give you a talisman, to turn Miss Smith into Woman-in-the-Woods every now and then.”  And with his pocket-knife he cut a sharp line down the thin old coin he had tossed, worked at it for a few minutes with a pocket file and a stone, and then with his fingers that looked so slim but were strong as steel nippers.  The coin broke in halves.