ut my hand and it touched hers. I seized it without an
instant of hesitation. "How could I resist you?" I said, and heard my
own whisper with a kind of amazement at its emotion. I raised her hand.
It was very cold and she seemed to have no thought of resistance; but
before it touched my lips something like a panic of prudence had
overcome me. I did not know what it would lead to--and I remembered that
I did not even know who she was. From the beginning she had struck me
as sinister and now, in the obscurity, her silence and her coldness
seemed to be a passive threatening of unknown entanglement. I let her
hand fall.

"We must be getting on," I said.

The road was shrouded and overhung by branches. There was a kind of
translucent light, enough to see her face, but I kept my eyes on the
ground. I was vexed. Now that it was past the episode appeared to be a
lost opportunity. We were to part in a moment, and her rare mental gifts
and her unfamiliar, but very vivid, beauty made the idea of parting
intensely disagreeable. She had filled me with a curiosity that she had
done nothing whatever to satisfy, and with a fascination that was very
nearly a fear. We mounted the hill and came out on a stretch of soft
common sward. Then the sound of our footsteps ceased and the world grew
more silent than ever. There were little enclosed fields all round us.
The moon threw a wan light, and gleaming mist hung in the ragged hedges.
Broad, soft roads ran away into space on every side.

"And now ..." I asked, at last, "shall we ever meet again?" My voice
came huskily, as if I had not spoken for years and years.

"Oh, very often," she answered.

"Very often?" I repeated. I hardly knew whether I was pleased or
dismayed. Through the gate-gap in a hedge, I caught a glimmer of a white
house front. It seemed to belong to another world; to another order of
things.

"Ah ... here is Callan's," I said. "This is where I was going...."

"I know," she answered; "we part here."

"To meet again?" I asked.

"Oh ... to meet again; why, yes, to meet again."

CHAPTER TWO

Her figure faded into the darkness, as pale things waver down into deep
water, and as soon as she disappeared my sense of humour returned. The
episode appeared more clearly, as a flirtation with an enigmatic, but
decidedly charming, chance travelling companion. The girl was a riddle,
and a riddle once guessed is a very trivial thing. She, too, would be a
very trivial thi