the rock outside was heard
with a strange and tragic sound, and her mobile face was all one sorrow.

'How cruel they must have been!' cries she with tremulous lip, her face
at the same time reddened with indignation.

'They were mere beastly monsters,' said I: 'it is nothing surprising if
monsters were cruel.'

And in the short time while I said that, she was looking up with a
new-born smile.

'Some others came and set the plisoner flee!' cries she.

'Yes,' said I, 'they did, but--'

'That was good of them,' says she.

'Yes,' said I, 'that was all right, so far as it went.'

'And it was a time when men had al-leady become cluel,' says she: 'if
those who set him flee were so good when all the lest were cluel, what
would they have been at a time when all the lest were kind? They would
have been just like Angels....!'

* * * * *

At this place fishing, and long rambles, were the order of the day, both
for her and for me, especially fishing, though a week rarely passed
which did not find me at Bouveret, St. Gingolph, Yvoire, Messery, Nyon,
Ouchy, Vevay, Montreux, Geneva, or one of the two dozen villages,
townlets, or towns, that crowd the shores, all very pretty places, each
with its charm, and mostly I went on foot, though the railway runs right
round the forty odd miles of the lake's length. One noon-day I was
walking through the main-street of Vevay going on to the Cully-road when
I had a fearful shock, for in a shop just in front of me to the right I
heard a sound--an unmistakable indication of life--as of clattering
metals shaken together. My heart leapt into my mouth, I was conscious of
becoming bloodlessly pale, and on tip-toe of exquisite caution I stole
up to the open door--peeped in--and it was she standing on the counter
of a jeweller's shop, her back turned to me, with head bent low over a
tray of jewels in her hands, which she was rummaging for something. I
went _'Hoh!'_ for I could not help it, and all that day, till sunset, we
were very dear friends, for I could not part from her, we walking
together by vor-alpen, wood, and shore all the way to Ouchy, she just
like a creature crazy that day with the bliss of living, rolling in
grasses and perilous flowery declines, stamping her foot defiantly at
me, arrogant queen that she is, and then running like mad for me to
catch her, with laughter, _abandon_, carolling railleries, and the
levity of the wild ass's colt on the h