ran coltishly past him and over the bridge, hiding her face
and calling gaily, "Come on! I want to get up on the hills!" And he
followed slowly, thinking pretty things about her.

When he drew abreast of her she had pulled off her tam-o'-shanter and
taken out her hairpins, and her hair was blowing sideways across her
breast and back. "It's good to feel the wind through one's hair," she
said. "I wish I had short hair like a man's."

"Why don't you cut yours off then?"

"I somehow feel it would be a shame when I have such a deal of it," she
answered innocently, and fell to chattering of the Spanish military nun
that de Quincey wrote about. She had passed herself off as a man all
right. Did he think a girl could go the length of that anywhere
nowadays? No? Surely there was somewhere? Oh, she was a child, a little
child, and it was not fair to talk to her of love for a little while
yet. It might be dangerous, for he had heard that sometimes, when a girl
was sought by men too soon, her girlhood tried to hold her back from
womanhood by raising obscure terrors that might last as long as life. He
would wait until she was eighteen. Yet when the avenue bent at right
angles half up the hillside, and they drew together as an army of winds
marched down upon them from the mountains, she looked at him through her
scattered hair, and her face was wholly a woman's. So might a woman
smile who was drowning under a deep tide and loved to drown so; yet from
a brave wisdom in her eyes it could be seen that she was abandoning
herself not to death but to life. This, beyond all doubt, was adult
love, though she herself was not aware of it. He had only to admit it by
some significant speech or act, to rise spiritually to the occasion, and
they would be fused together as perpetual lovers.

He was conscious again as he had been when she sat with the coins before
her in the little dining-room in Hume Park Square, of an involuntary
austerity in his passion which, while he did not see the sense of it, he
recognised to be the authentic note of love. A moment ago, when she
still seemed a child, he had been thinking what fun it would be to kiss
her suddenly on the very tip of that pink little nose which moved when
she talked as a rabbit's does when it eats, to lay hold of her hands
roughly and see how far those ink-stained fingers, still pliable as
children's are, would bend back towards her wrist. But now that she was
a woman the passion between th