nds behind her head; her face was uptilted to the sky.

His eyes followed her gaze. Over their heads the wind had piled up a
great palace of white clouds; under the rifted floors the blue sky
ran shallow in a faint milky turquoise, while above, between, beyond
those aerial roofs and pinnacles and domes it deepened to _lapis
lazuli_, luminous, transparent, light behind color and color behind
light. The green earth looked greener under the low-lying shafts of
blue and silver; far off, on the sea, the shadows of the clouds lay
like the stain of spilt red wine.

"Who was the great man?" she asked with apparent irrelevance, "who
said that women were incapable of a disinterested passion for
nature?"

He knitted his brows. Frida had proved a little disconcerting at
times. He had had to begin all over again with her, aware that,
though ostensibly renewing their old acquaintance, he was actually
making a new one, to which faint recognitions and perishing
reminiscences gave a bewildering, elusive charm. But Frida
remembered many things that he had forgotten, and a certain
directness and familiarity born of this superior memory of hers
puzzled him and put him out. This time, however, he had a dreamy
recollection.

"Fancy your remembering that!"

"I remember everything. At any rate, I remember quite enough to see
that you're just the same; you haven't changed a little bit. Except
that you don't look as you did the first night I met you."

"And how did I look then?"

She paused, carefully selecting her phrase. "You looked--as if--I'd
given you a shock. You had expected something different. That dream
did _not_ tally with the reality."

"How on earth----"

"How on earth did I know? You may not be aware of it, but you have a
very expressive face."

"I was not aware of it."

Poor Durant. His face was expressive enough now in all conscience.
She held out her hand and laid it on his sleeve, and he remembered
how she used to shrink from his touch.

"My dear Mr. Durant, don't look like that; it makes my heart bleed.
Of course I saw it. I saw everything. I saw your face looking over
the banisters as I was going downstairs, when I've no doubt you
thought you'd caught sight of a very pretty woman; and I saw it with
a very different expression on it when you shook hands and found
that the woman wasn't a bit pretty, after all. Of course it was a
shock to you, and of course I understood. I knew so exactly how you
felt, and I wa