‘You are stronger.  You have grown,’ he said.

’Yes, I ride a lot with the children.  It is good for me.  I love it.  This life agrees with me well.  But it is not only a change in you, it is a transformation.  Why, you can laugh!’

‘Come, come!  I could always laugh.’

She shook her head.  ’Not convincingly.  You love the new land?  You have prospered?’

‘Yes,’ he answered, ‘I have had a wonderful spell of life.’

‘And the people—­you find you can like them?’

The question gave him rather a shock; he had to think a moment to recall her optimistic advice and his old frame of mind.

‘Like is too feeble a word,’ he said presently.  ’The thought of them warms my heart.’

‘Ah, that is good!’ She clasped his hand impulsively.  ’That is best of all.  I was afraid you might cling to your mistrust, and shut the kindly people out of your life.’

‘Before it was the people shut me out.’

‘Are you sure?’

He had never doubted, now the question set him wondering for a minute.  He looked at her again.  Certainly she had developed observation, acuteness.  Or had he?  Once more he wondered.  He watched her with new interest.  She was not so pretty as she had seemed on the Francis Cadman; the ethereality was gone, but Done liked her the better for it.  He felt his whole physical being to be in sympathy with vital things, and, after all, how often the poets, in their rhapsodies on spirituelle and unearthly women, were merely rapturously apostrophizing the evidences of dissolution!  He met her now without a doubt in his heart, with a soul free to respond to his natural emotions, and she filled him with delight.  Unconsciously he was wooing her—­not with words, but with accents more eloquent, and the girl felt it instinctively, with a sense of triumph.

‘I can’t take my eyes off you,’ he said.  ‘In what are you so different?’

She smiled pleasantly.  ’I am dreadfully sunburnt; I am no longer thin; I do not brood.’

‘No, no; it is a difference of spirit.  Where is that constraint we felt?’

‘The constraint was wholly with you.’  She blushed again.

The kissing episode had been recalled to both.  He laughed gaily, feeling very comfortable, quite forgetful of his mate.

’Yes, I was certainly a humourless, gloomy young fool he said.

‘Only an unhappy boy,’ she murmured, ‘and my wonderful hero.’  She, too, spoke as if it were a matter of long years ago, when she was a silly slip of a girl.

‘And is there no hero now?’

‘I have found no other.’

‘Ah, that is something!  Do you still pray for the old one, Lucy?’

‘But you have no faith in prayers.’

‘I may have in the prayer.’

’Well, then, I do.  You see, you can never be wholly undeserving in my eyes.’  With Lucy, as with many girls in whom gratitude is the precursor of love, most of the sentiments due to the kindling affection were credited to gratitude.