and
they laugh and say I'm conceited."

"Well, you are," said Michael, feeling bound not to lose the opportunity
of impressing Stella with disapproval as well as comprehension.

"I know I am. But I must be to go on being myself. Oh, you darling
brother, you do understand me. I've longed for someone to understand me.
Mother's only proud of me."

"I'm not at all proud of you," said Michael crushingly.

"I don't want you to be. If you were proud of me, you'd think I belonged
to you, and I don't ever want to belong to anybody."

"I shouldn't think you ever would," said Michael encouragingly, as they
paced the sensuous mossy path in a rapture of avowals. "I should think
you'd frighten anybody except me. But why do you fall in love, then?"

"Oh, because I want to make people die with despair."

"Great Scott, you are an unearthly kid."

"Oh, I'm glad I'm unearthly," said Stella. "I'd like to be a sort of
Undine. I think I am. I don't think I've got a soul, because when I play
I go rushing out into the darkness to look for my soul, and the better I
play the nearer I get."

Michael stopped beneath an oak-tree and surveyed this extraordinary
sister of his.

"Well, I always thought I was a mystic, but, good Lord, you're fifty
times as much of a mystic as I am," he exclaimed with depressed
conviction.

Suddenly Stella gave a loud scream.

"What on earth are you yelling at?" said Michael.

"Oh, Michael, look--a most enormous animal. Oh, look, oh, let me get up
a tree. Oh, help me up. Push me up this tree."

"It's a wild-boar," declared Michael in a tone of astonished interest.

Stella screamed louder than ever and clung to Michael, sobbing. The
boar, however, went on its way, routing among the herbage.

"Well, you may be a genius," said Michael, "but you're an awful little
funk."

"But I was frightened."

"Wild-boars aren't dangerous except when they're being hunted," Michael
asserted positively.

Stella soon became calm under the influence of her brother's equanimity.
Arm-in-arm they sauntered back towards Compiegne, and so for a month of
serene weather they sauntered every day, and every day Michael pondered
more and more deeply the mystery of woman. He was sorry to say good-bye
to Stella when she went back to Germany, and longed for the breathless
hour of her first concert, wishful that all his life he might stand
between her and the world, the blundering wild-boar of a world.

Chapter XI: _Action