’What led it,—­not astray,—­was your calm declining of all but true words of service.’

‘O, had you gone back there?’ she said.  ’I think it takes very little philosophy to decline what one does not want.’

’Evidently.  But how came you not to want what everybody else wants?  There is the philosophy, you see.  If you bring all things down to bare truth, you will be Diogenes in his tub presently.’

’ “Bare truth!” ’—­said the girl.  ’How people say that, as if truth were only a lay figure!’

’But think how disagreeable truth would often be, if it were not draped!  Could you stand it?  I beg pardon!  I mean, not you, but other people!’

‘I have stood it pretty often,’ said the girl with a grave gesture of her head.

‘Impossible!  But did you believe that it was truth?’

‘Too self-evident to be doubted!’

Stuart laughed, again with a very unfeigned tribute of pleasure or admiration in his face.  ’It is a disagreeable truth,’ said he, ’that that is not a good sandwich.  Permit me to supply its place with something else.  Here is cake, and nothing beside that I can see; will you have a piece of cake?  It is said to be a feminine taste.’

‘No, not any cake,’ said Wych Hazel, her eyes searching the brook shadows.  ’But I will have another sandwich, Mr. Nightingale—­if there is one.  At least, if there is more than one!’

‘Ah,’ said Stuart, ’you shall have it, and you shall not know the state of the basket.  Those two people have so much to talk about, they have no time to eat!’ And he took another sandwich himself.

‘Is that old woman in the cottage a friend of yours?’

‘I never saw her before the other day.’

’She lost no time!  A little garrulous, isn’t she?  I made acquaintance there one day when I went in to light a cigar.  I have a mind to ask you to give me the distinction I am ready to claim, of being your oldest acquaintance in these parts.  I think I shall claim it yet.  Let me look at the state of your hook.’

They dropped their lines in the brook again, but no fish were caught, and fish might cleverly have run away with their bait several times without being found out.  The conversation was lively for some time.  Stuart had sense and was amusing, and had roamed about the world enough to have a great deal to say.  The pair were not agreeably interrupted after half an hour by Mme. Lasalle, who discovered that Wych Hazel was fishing where she could get nothing, and brought her down the brook to the close neighbourhood of Miss Powder, where Stuart’s attentions had to be divided.  But so the two girls had a chance to see something of each other; a chance which Miss Powder improved with manifest satisfaction.  She was a wax-Madonna sort of beauty, with a sweet face, fair, pure, placid, but either somewhat impassive or quite self-contained in its character.  Her figure was good, her few words showed her not wanting in sense or breeding.