in the great struggle for freedom, who can make
themselves capable of great things, even if escape is impossible. But I
do not think that escape is so impossible after all, is it? There have
been men, and women too, who have lived in all times, to whom there have
been no to-morrows or any yesterdays. Only it seems rather hard that
life for those who seek it must always be a battle!"

I did not answer her for several minutes. It was true, then, that the
old days had passed away. Isobel, the child whom we had known and loved
so well, had disappeared. It was Isobel the incomprehensible who was
taking her place. What might the change not mean for us?...

Later we walked back over an open heath yellow with gorse, and faintly
pink with the promise of the heather to come. Isobel carried her hat in
her hand. She walked with her head thrown back, and a smile playing
every now and then upon her lips. She was so completely absorbed that I
found myself every now and then watching her, half expecting, I believe,
to find some physical change to accord with that other more mysterious
evolution. She walked with all the grace of long limbs and unfettered
clothing. Her figure, though perfectly graceful, and with that same
peculiar distinction which had first attracted me, was as yet wholly
immature. But in the face itself there were signs of a coming change.
Wherein it might lie I could not tell, but it was there, an intangible
and wholly elusive thing. I think that a certain fear of it and what it
might mean oppressed me with the sense of coming trouble. I was more
fully conscious then than ever before of the moral responsibility of our
peculiar charge.

We crossed a straight dusty road, cleaving the rolling moor like a belt
of ribbon. Isobel looked thoughtfully along it.

"I wonder," she said, "when Arthur will come down!"

The folly of a man is a thing sometimes outside his own power of
control. A second before I had been wondering of whom and what she had
been thinking.

"Not just yet, I'm afraid," Allan answered, stopping to light his pipe.
"It is not easy for him to get backwards and forwards, and I believe
that he is by way of being rather busy just now."

"What a nuisance!" Isobel declared, looking behind her regretfully. "The
roads about here seem so good."

"The roads are good, but the heath is better," Allan answered. "I will
race you for half a pound of chocolates to that clump of pines!"

"You are such a slow star