The quality of her voice startled him more then her words.  There was a deeper, darker glow in her eyes as she watched their effect upon him.  She swept out a gleaming white arm, still moist with the water of the pool, taking in the wide, autumn-tinted spaces about them.

“I am alone,” she repeated, still keeping her eyes on his face.  “Entirely alone.  That is why you startled me—­why I was afraid.  This is my hiding-place, and I thought—­”

He saw that she had spoken words that she would have recalled.  She hesitated.  Her lips trembled.  In that moment of suspense a little gray ermine dislodged a stone from the rock ridge above them, and at the sound of it as it struck behind her the girl gave a start, and a quick flash of the old fear leaped for an instant into her face.  And now Philip beheld something in her which he had been too bewildered and wonder-struck to observe before.  Her first terror had been so acute that he had failed to see what remained after her fright had passed.  But it was clear to him now, and the look that came into his own face told her that he had made the discovery.

The beauty of her face, her eyes, her hair—­the wonder of her presence six hundred miles from civilization—­had held him spellbound.  He had seen only the deep lustre and the wonderful blue of her eyes.  Now he saw that those eyes, exquisite in their loveliness, were haunted by something which she was struggling to fight back—­a questing, hunted look that burned there steadily, and of which he was not the cause.  A deep-seated grief, a terror far back, shone through the forced calmness with which she was speaking to him.  He knew that she was fighting with herself, that the nervously twitching fingers at her breast told more than her lips had confessed.  He stepped nearer to her and held out a hand, and when he spoke his voice was vibrant with the thing that made men respect him and women have faith in him.

“Tell me—­what you started to say,” he entreated quietly.  “This is your hiding-place, and you thought—­what?  I think that I can guess.  You thought that I was some one else, whom you have reason to fear.”

She did not answer.  It was as if she had not yet completely measured him.  Her eyes told him that.  They were not looking at him, but into him.  And they were softly beautiful as wood violets.  He found himself looking steadily into them—­close, so close that he could have reached out and touched her.  Slowly there came over them a filmy softness.  And then, marvellously, he saw the tears gathering, as dew might gather over the sweet petals of a flower.  And still for a moment she did not speak.  There came a little quiver at her throat, and she caught herself with a quick, soft breath.

“Yes, I thought you were some one else—­whom I fear,” she said then.  “But why should I tell you?  You are from down there, from what you please to call civilization.  I should distrust you because of that.  So why—­why should I tell you?”