ng crushed under
advancing feet, but she did not look up, only started to hum a little
tune, though she could not hear it for the rising beat of her own heart
in her ears.

When Ishmael merely dropped down beside her and, asking if he might
smoke, proceeded to light his pipe, she calmed a trifle--a sick dread
that she dismissed as impossible flashed through her; she peeped at him
from her tilted hat brim, and saw his hands were trembling slightly as
he struck the match. In a moment she had caught back her own poise; she
watched sidelong, noting with an odd precision exactly how he looked,
how his brown skin glistened a little in the sun, so close to her that
she could see the infinitesimal criss-cross of lines upon the backs of
his hands and the stronger seams upon his reddened neck. She saw the
glisten of a few grey hairs in the dark thick patch above his ear; she
could see the texture of his lip as it pouted beneath the sideways hang
of his pipe. She wondered why anyone ever really loved someone else;
looked at like that, and thought of clearly, reasonably, they did not
look very wonderful, but only obvious flesh and blood, enclosing
something that, try as one might, must always remain alien, cut off. Yet
she knew that, reason as she might, this particular piece of flesh and
blood, animated by this particular soul, had power over hers that her
leaping pulses at the very sound of his footfalls, that her eager
planning mind at night in her bed, would not let her deny. Suddenly she
looked away from him, and, twisting her hands in the dew-wet grass,
spoke. "I've written to Val," she said.

Ishmael did not answer, and she went on:

"You don't seem very interested, but I'm so full of it I must tell
someone. After all one doesn't break off an engagement every day...."

He turned towards her then, dropped his pipe, and looked full at her.

"You mean that? You have definitely done it?"

"Undone it," she said cheerfully; "it would never have answered. I've
known that for ages. He's so much cleverer than I am, but so much less
wise! He's just a nice boy who would be the ordinary simple kind if it
weren't for his music. And even there we can't agree, you see."

"I'm not clever--not the kind that can do clever things," said Ishmael.

"It's not the doing clever things that matters, I've come to the
conclusion, though Val would think that was heresy. Being things matters
more, somehow. He knows all about music, and they say