tery. She would tell Gwinnie about Gibson Herbert when she
came. She would have to tell her.

Down at the end of the looking-glass picture, behind her, the bow window
and the slender back of a man standing there.

* * * * *

She had got him clear by this time. If he went to-morrow he would
stay, moving about forever in your mind. The young body, alert and
energetic; slender gestures of hands. The small imperious head carried
high. The spare, oval face with the straight-jutting, pointed chin.
Honey-white face, thin dusk and bistre of eyelids and hollow temples
and the roots of the hair. Its look of being winged, lifted up, ready
to start off on an adventure. Hair brushed back in two sleek, dark
wings. The straight slender nose, with the close upward wings of its
nostrils (it wasn't Roman after all). Under it the winged flutter of
his mouth when he smiled.

Black eyebrows almost meeting, the outer ends curling up queerly, like
little moustaches. And always the hard, blue knife-blade eyes.

She knew his name the first day. He had told her. Conway. John
Roden Conway.

The family from Birmingham had frightened him. So he sat at her table in
the bow. They talked. About places--places. Places they had seen and
hadn't seen; places they wanted to see, and the ways you could get to
places. He trusted to luck; he risked things; he was out, he said, for
risk. She steered by the sun, by instinct, by the map in her head. She
remembered. But you could buy maps. He bought one the next day.

They went for long walks together. She found out the field paths. And
they talked. Long, innocent conversations. He told her about himself. He
came from Coventry. His father was a motor car manufacturer; that was why
_he_ liked tramping.

She told him she was going to learn farming. You could be happy all day
long looking after animals. Swinging up on the big bare backs of cart
horses and riding them to water; milking cows and feeding calves. And
lambs. When their mothers were dead. They would run to you then, and
climb into your lap and sit there--sucking your fingers.

As they came in and went out together the family from Birmingham
glared at them.

"Did you see how they glared?"

"Do you mind?" he said.

"Not a bit."

"No more do I. It doesn't matter what people like that do. Their souls
are horrible. They leave a glairy trail everywhere they go. If they were
dead--stretched out on their death beds-