she said; "what are we waiting for?"

The descent was easy and gradual. We came down, following the path, over
the hill-shoulders. A stream of clear water dripped among stones; it
all brought back to me with an intense delight the recollection of long
days spent among such hills in holiday times on earth, but all without
regret; I only wished that an old and dear friend of mine, with whom I
had often gone, might be with me. He had quitted life before me, and I
knew somehow or hoped that I should before long see him; but I did not
wish things to be otherwise; and, indeed, I had a strange interest in
the fretful, silly, lovely girl with me, and in what lay before us. She
prattled on, and seemed to be recovering her spirits and her confidence
at the sights around us. If I could but find anything that would draw
her out of her restless mood into the peace of the morning! She had a
charm for me, though her impatience and desire for amusement seemed
uninteresting enough; and I found myself talking to her as an elder
brother might, with terms of familiar endearment, which she seemed to be
grateful for. It was strange in a way, and yet it all appeared natural.
The more we drew away from the hills, the happier she became. "Ah," she
said once, "we have got out of that hateful place, and now perhaps we
may be more comfortable,"--and when we came down beside the stream to a
grove of trees, and saw something which seemed like a road beneath us,
she was delighted. "That's more like it," she said, "and now we may find
some real people perhaps,"--she turned to me with a smile--"though you
are real enough too, and very kind to me; but I still have an idea that
you are a clergyman, and are only waiting your time to draw a moral."

IX

Now before I go on to tell the tale of what happened to us in the valley
there were two very curious things that I observed or began to observe.

The first was that I could not really see into the girl's thought. I
became aware that though I could see into the thought of Amroth as
easily and directly as one can look into a clear sea-pool, with all its
rounded pebbles and its swaying fringes of seaweed, there was in the
girl's mind a centre of thought to which I was not admitted, a fortress
of personality into which I could not force my way. More than that. When
she mistrusted or suspected me, there came a kind of cloud out from the
central thought, as if a turbid stream were poured into the sea-po