motioning me to follow picked her dainty way through the gorse to a flat rock among the ferns.
“They will be here directly,” she said, and taking a seat at one end of the rock invited me to sit down on the other edge. The after glow was beginning to fade in the sky and a single star twinkled faintly through the rosy haze. A long wavering triangle of water-fowl drifted southward over our heads and from the swamps around plover were calling.
“They are very beautiful—these moors,” she said quietly.
“Beautiful, but cruel to strangers,” I answered.
“Beautiful and cruel,” she repeated dreamily, “beautiful and cruel.”
“Like a woman,” I said stupidly.
“Oh,” she cried with a little catch in her breath and looked at me. Her dark eyes met mine and I thought she seemed angry or frightened.
“Like a woman,” she repeated under her breath, “how cruel to say so!” Then after a pause, as though speaking aloud to herself, “how cruel for him to say that.”
I don’t know what sort of an apology I offered for my inane, though harmless speech, but I know that she seemed so troubled about it that I began to think I had said something very dreadful without knowing it, and remembered with horror the pitfalls and snares which the French language sets for foreigners. While I was trying to imagine what I might have said, a sound of voices came across the moor and the girl rose to her feet.
“No,” she said, with a trace of a smile on her pale face, “I will not accept your apolo-
