er. The repeated
shock to his nerves had produced a chilly feeling of depression and
almost fear, which he could not immediately shake off, and he stood back
against the opposite hedge, with his half-eaten bread in his hand,
conscious that he looked and felt more like a whipped schoolboy than, as
he had fondly imagined when he first stopped the woman, the hero of a
rural love scene. That was nothing; he was, as he had described
himself, a man who devoted his life to the search for knowledge, and
personal consciousness was almost lost in the intense curiosity which
the circumstances had aroused in him. With the trained mind of one
accustomed to investigation, he instantly perceived that his only clue
to the explanation of the phenomenon lay in the personality of the
woman. His one eager desire was to probe her thought through and
through, but how was he to approach the interior portals of a mind
guarded by a will as free and strong as his own? He would fain have
bound down her will with strong cords and analysed the secrets of her
mind with ruthless vivisection. But how? His tact, trained by all the
subtleties of a life cast in cultured social relations, was unequal to
the occasion, and, fearing to lose ground by a false step, he remained
silent.

The woman finished eating and shook herself free of the crumbs. He
supposed, almost with a sense of desperation, that she was about to
leave him before he could begin his inquiry, but instead of moving she
motioned him to come near, and he went, and stood on the road in front
of her.

'Ye says yer a man o' larning, an' I b'lieves ye, she began.

He was about to reply that he was only a seeker after truth, but he was
checked by the knowledge that she would accept no answer she could not
understand. He fell back on the truth as it was to her, and said
simply, 'Yes.'

'I wants to ask ye two questions; will ye answer like an honest man?'

She had laid aside all her loud rudeness, and was speaking with intense
earnestness--an earnestness that won his entire respect.

'I will indeed answer you honestly, if I can answer.'

'Then tell me this--What's the soael o' a man?'

He stood with lips sealed, partly by surprise at the question, and
partly by self-acknowledged ignorance of the answer.

'The soael o' a man,' she repeated more distinctly, 'ye knows what I mean
surely?'

Yes, he knew what she meant, but he knew also that his own most honest
convictions hovered between a