There had been no need to reserve the small hours for these ruminations. The next few days were wet and windy; every glance at the streaming panes cast my mind into a sort of vacancy. The wind trumpeted smoke into the room; I could fix my mind on nothing. Then the weather faired. There came "a red sky at night," and Spica flashing secrets to me across the darkness; and that supper-time I referred as casually as possible to Mr Anon.

"I suppose one must keep one's promises, Mrs Bowater, even to a stranger. Would half-past six be too early to keep mine, do you think? Would it look too—forward? Of course he may have forgotten all about me by this time."

Mrs Bowater eyed me like an owl as I bent my cheeks over my bowl of bread and milk, and proceeded to preach me yet another little sermon on the ways of the world. Nevertheless, the next morning saw us setting out together in the crisp, sparkling air to my tryst, with the tacit understanding that she accompanied me rather in the cause of propriety than romance.

Owing, I fancy, to a bunion, she was so leisurely a walker that it was I who must set my pace to hers. But the day promised to be warm, and we could take our ease. As we wandered on among the early flowers and bright, green grass, and under the beeches, a mildness lightened into her face. Over her long features lay a vacant yet happy smile, of which she seemed to be unaware. This set me off thinking in the old, old fashion; comparing my lot with that of ordinary human beings. How fortunate I was. If only she could have seen the lowlier plants as I could—scarcely looking down on any, and of the same stature as some among the taller of them, so that the air around me was dyed and illumined with their clear colours, and burthened with their breath.

The least and humblest of them—not merely crisp-edged lichen, speckle-seed whitlow-grass and hyssop in the wall—are so close to earth, the wonder, indeed, is that common-sized people ever see them at all. They must, at any rate, I thought, commit themselves to their stomachs, or go down on their knees to see them properly. So, on we went, Mrs Bowater and I, she pursuing her private musings, and I mine.

I smiled to myself at remembrance of Dr Phelps and his blushes. After all, if humanity should "dwindle into a delicate littleness," it would make a good deal more difference than he had supposed. What a destruction would ensue, among all the lesser creatures of the earth, the squirrels, moles, voles, hedgehogs, and the birds, not to mention the bees and hornets. They would be the enemies then—the traps and poisons and the nets! No more billowy cornfields a good yard high, no more fine nine-foot hedges flinging their blossoms into the air. And all the long-legged, "doubled," bloated garden flowers, gone clean out of favour. It would be a little world, would it be a happier? The dwarfed Mrs Bowaters, Dr Phelpses, Miss Bullaces, Lady Pollackes.

But there was little chance of such an eventuality—at least in my lifetime. It was far likelier that the Miss M.'s of the world would continue to be a by-play. Yet, as I glanced up at my companion, and called to mind other such "Lapland Giants" of mine, I can truthfully avouch that I did not much envy their extra inches. So much more thin-skinned surface to be kept warm and unscratched. The cumbersome bones, the curious distance from foot and fingertip to brain, too; and those quarts and quarts of blood. I shuddered. It was little short of a miracle that they escaped continual injury; and what an extended body in which to die.

On the other hand, what real loss was mine—with so much to my advantage? These great spreading beech-trees were no less shady and companionable to me than to them. Nor, thought I, could moon or sun or star or ocean or mountain be any the less silvery, hot, lustrous, and remote, forlorn in beauty, or vast in strangeness, one way or the other, than they are to ordinary people. Could there be any doubt at all, too, that men had always coveted to make much finer and more delicate things than their clumsiness allowed?

What fantastic creatures they were!—with their vast mansions, pyramids, palaces, scores of sizes too large either for carcass or mind. Their Satan a monster on whose wrist the vulture of the Andes could perch like an aphis on my thumb; yet their Death but skeleton-high, and their Saviour of such a stature that wellnigh without stooping He could have laid His fingers on my head.

Time's sands had been trickling fast while I thought these small thoughts that bright spring daybreak. So, though we had loitered on our way, it seemed we had reached our destination on the wings of the morning. Alas, Mrs Bowater's smile can have been only skin-deep; for, when, lifting my eyes from the ground I stopped all of a sudden, spread out my hands, and cried in triumph, "There! Mrs Bowater"; she hardly shared my rapture.

She disapproved of the vast, blank "barn of a place," with its blackshot windows and cold chimneys. The waste and ruination of the garden displeased her so much that I grew a little ashamed of my barbarism.

"It's all going to wrack and ruin," she exclaimed, snorting at my stone summer-house no less emphatically than she had snorted at Mrs Monnerie. "Not a walkable walk, nor the trace of a border; and was there ever such a miggle-maggle of weeds! A fine house in its prime, miss, but now, money melting away like butter in the sun."

"But," said I, standing before her in the lovely light amid the dwelling dewdrops, "really and truly, Mrs Bowater, it is only going back to its own again. What you call a miggle-maggle is what these things were made to be. They are growing up now by themselves; and if you could look as close as I can, you'd see they breathe only what each can spare. They are just racing along to live as wildly as they possibly can. It's the tameness," I expostulated, flinging back my hood, "that would be shocking to me."

Mrs Bowater looked down at me, listening to this high-piped recitative with an unusual inquisitiveness.

"Well, that's as it may be," she retorted, "but what I'm asking is, Where's the young fellow? He don't seem to be as punctual as they were when I was a girl."

My own eyes had long been busy, but as yet in vain.

"I did not come particularly to see him," was my airy reply. "Besides, we said no time—any fine day. Shall we sit down?"

With a secretive smile Mrs Bowater spread a square of waterproof sheeting over a flat stone that had fallen out of the coping of the house, unfolded a newspaper over the grass, and we began our breakfast. Neither of us betrayed much appetite for it; she, I fancy, having already fortified herself out of her brown teapot before leaving the house, and I because of the odour of india-rubber and newspaper—an odour presently intensified by the moisture and the sun. Paying no heed to my fastidious nibblings, she munched on reflectively, while I grew more and more ill at ease, first because the "young fellow" was almost visibly sinking in my old friend's esteem, and next because her cloth-booted foot lay within a few inches of the stone beneath which was hidden Fanny's letter.

"It'll do you good, the sea," she remarked presently, after sweeping yet one more comprehensive glance around her, "and we can only hope Mrs Monnerie will be as good as her word. A spot like this—trespassing or not—is good for neither man nor beast. And when you are young the more human company you get, with proper supervising, the better."

"Were you happy as a girl, Mrs Bowater?" I inquired after a pause.

Our voices went up and up into the still, mild air. "Happy enough—for my own good," she said, neatly screwing up her remaining biscuits in their paper bag. "In my days children were brought up. Taught to make themselves useful. I would as soon have lifted a hand against my mother as answer her back."

"You mean she—she whipped you?"

"If need be," my landlady replied complacently, folding her thread-gloved hands on her lap and contemplating the shiny toecaps of her boots. "She had large hands, my mother; and plenty of temper kept well under control. What's more, if life isn't a continual punishment for the stoopidities and wickedness of others, not to mention ourselves, then it must be even a darker story than was ever told me."

"And was, Mrs Bowater, Mr Bowater your—your first——" I looked steadily at a flower at my foot in case she might be affected at so intimate a question, and not wish me to see her face.

"If Mr Bowater was not the first," was her easy response, "he may well live to boast of being the last. Which is neither here nor there, for we may be sure he's enjoying attentive nursing. Broken bones are soon mended. It's when things are disjointed from the root that the wrench comes."

The storm-felled bole lay there beside us, as if for picture to her parable. I began to think rather more earnestly than I had intended to that morning. In my present state of conscience, it was never an easy matter to decide whether Mrs Bowater's comments on life referred openly to things in general or covertly to me in particular. How fortunate that the scent of Fanny's notepaper was not potent enough to escape from its tomb. And whether or not, speech seemed less dangerous than silence.

"It seems to me, Mrs Bowater," I began rather hastily, "at least to judge from my own father and mother, that a man depends very much on a woman. Men don't seem to grow up in the same way, though I suppose they are practical enough as men."

"If it were one female," was the reply, "there'd be less to be found fault with. That poor young creature over there took her life for no better reason, even though the reason was turned inside out as you may say."

I met the frightful, louring stare of the house. "What was her name?" I whispered—but into nothing, for, bolt upright as she was, Mrs Bowater had shut her eyes, as if in preparation for a nap.

A thread-like tangle of song netted the air. We were, indeed, trespassers. I darted my glance this way and that, in and out of the pale green whispering shadows in this wild haunt. Then, realizing by some faint stir in my mind that the stiff, still, shut-away figure beside me was only feigning to be asleep, I opened the rain-warped covers of my Sense and Sensibility, and began plotting how to be rid of her for a while, so that my solitude might summon my stranger, and I might recover Fanny's letter.

Then once more I knew. Raising my eyes, I looked straight across at him, scowling there beneath his stunted thorn in a drift of flowers like fool's parsley. He was making signs, too, with his hands. I watched him pensively, in secret amusement. Then swifter than Daphne into her laurel, instantaneously he vanished, and I became aware that its black eyes were staring out from the long face of the motionless figure beside me, as might an owl's into an aviary.

"Did you hear a bird, Mrs Bowater?" I inquired innocently.

"When I was a girl," said the mouth, "sparrowhawks were a common sight, but I never heard one sing."

"But isn't a sparrowhawk quite a large bird?"

"We must judge," said Mrs Bowater, "not by the size, but the kind. Elseways, miss, your old friend might have been found sleeping, as they say, at her box." She pretended to yawn, gathered her legs under her, and rose up and up. "I'll be taking a little walk round. And you shall tell your young acquaintance that I mean him no harm, but that I mean you the reverse; and if show himself he won't, well, here I sit till the Day of Judgment."

An angry speech curled the tip of my tongue. But the simple-faced flowers were slowly making obeisance to Mrs Bowater's black, dragging skirts, and when she was nearly out of sight I sallied out to confront my stranger.

His face was black with rage and contempt. "That contaminating scarecrow; who's she?" was his greeting. "The days I have waited!"

The resentment that had simmered up in me on his behalf now boiled over against him. I looked at him in silence.

"That contaminating scarecrow, as you are pleased to call her, is the best friend I have in the world. I need no other."

"And I," he said harshly, "have no friend in this world, and need you."

"Then," said I, "you have lost your opportunity. Do you suppose I am a child—to be insulted and domineered over only because I am alone? Possibly," and my lips so trembled that I could hardly frame the words, "it is your face I shall see when I think of those windows."

I was speaking wiselier than I knew. He turned sharply, and by a play of light it seemed that at one of them there stood looking down on us out of the distance a shape that so had watched for ever, leering darkly out of the void. And there awoke in me the sense of this stranger's extremity of solitude, of his unhappy disguise, of his animal-like patience.

"Why," I said, "Mrs Bowater! You might far rather be thanking her for—for——"

"Curses on her," he choked, turning away. "There was everything to tell you."

"What everything?"

"Call her back now," he muttered furiously.

"That," I said smoothly, "is easily done. But, forgive me, I don't know your name."

His eyes wandered over the turf beneath me, mounted slowly up, my foot to my head, and looked into mine. In their intense regard I seemed to be but a bubble floating away into the air. I shivered, and turned my back on him, without waiting for an answer. He followed me as quietly as a sheep.

Mrs Bowater had already come sauntering back to our breakfast table, and with gaze impassively fixed on the horizon, pretended not to be aware of our approach.

I smiled back at my companion as we drew near. "This, Mrs Bowater," said I, "is Mr Anon. Would you please present him to Miss Thomasina of Bedlam?"

For a moment or two they stood facing one another, just as I have seen two insects stand—motionless, regardful, exchanging each other's presences. Then, after one lightning snap at him from her eye, she rose to my bait like a fish. "A pleasant morning, sir," she remarked affably, though in her Bible voice. "My young lady and I were enjoying the spring air."

Back to memory comes the darkness of a theatre, and Mrs Monnerie breathing and sighing beside me, and there on the limelit green of the stage lolls ass-headed Bottom the Weaver cracking jokes with the Fairies.

My Oberon addressed Mrs Bowater as urbanely as St George must have addressed the Dragon—or any other customary monster.

He seemed to pass muster, none the less, for she rose, patted her sheet, pushed forward her bonnet on to her rounded temples, and bade him a composed good-morning. She would be awaiting me, she announced, in an hour's time under my beech tree.

"I think, perhaps, two, Mrs Bowater," I said firmly.

She gave me a look—all our long slow evening firelit talks together seemed to be swimming in its smile; and withdrew.

The air eddied into quiet again. The stretched-out blue of the sky was as bland and solitary as if a seraph sat dreaming on its Eastern outskirts. Mr Anon and I seated ourselves three or four feet apart, and I watched the sidelong face, so delicately carved against the green; yet sunken in so sullen a stare.

Standing up on his feet against the background of Mrs Bowater's ink-black flounces, with his rather humped shoulders and straight hair, he had looked an eccentric, and, even to my view, a stunted figure. Now the whole scene around us seemed to be sorting itself into a different proportion before my eyes. He it was who was become the unit of space, the yard-stick of the universe. The flowers, their roots glintily netted with spider-webs, nodded serenely over his long hands. A peacock butterfly with folded colours sipped of the sunshine on a tuft nearly at evens with his cheek. The very birds sang to his size, and every rift between the woodlands awaited the cuckoo. Only his clothes were grotesque, but less so than in my parlour Mr Crimble's skirts, or even Lady Pollacke's treacherous bonnet.

I folded my white silk gloves into a ball. A wren began tweeting in a bush near by. "I am going away soon," I said, "to the sea."

The wren glided away out of sight amongst its thorns. I knew by his sudden stillness that this had been unwelcome news. "That will be very pleasant for me, won't it?" I said.

"The sea?" he returned coldly, with averted head. "Well, I am bound still further."

The reply fretted me. I wanted bare facts just then. "Why are you so angry? What is your name? And where do you live?" It was my turn to ask questions, and I popped them out as if from a Little by Little.

And then, with his queer, croaking, yet captivating voice, he broke into a long, low monologue. He gave me his name—and "Mr Anon" describes him no worse. He waved his hand vaguely in the direction of the house he lived in. But instead of apologizing for his ill-temper, he accused me of deceiving and humiliating him; of being, so I gathered, a toy of my landlady's, of betraying and soiling myself.

Why all this wild stuff only seemed to flatter me, I cannot say. I listened and laughed, pressing flat with both hands the sorry covers of my book, and laughed also low in my heart.

"Oh, contempt!" he cried. "I am used to that."

The words curdled on his tongue as he expressed his loathing of poor Mrs Bowater and her kind—mere Humanity—that ate and drank in musty houses stuck up out of the happy earth like warts on the skin, that battened on meat, stalked its puddled streets and vile, stifling towns, spread its rank odours on the air, increased and multiplied. Monstrous in shape, automatic, blinded by habit, abandoned by instinct, monkey-like, degraded!

What an unjust tirade! He barked it all out at me as if the blame were mine; as if I had nibbled the Apple. I turned my face away, smiling, but listening. Did I realize, he asked me, what a divine fortune it was to be so little, and in this to be All. On and on he raved: I breathed air "a dewdrop could chill"; I was as near lovely naught made visible as the passing of a flower; the mere mattering of a dream. And when I died my body would be but a perishing flake of manna, and my bones....

"Yes, a wren's picking," I rudely interrupted. "And what of my soul, please? Why, you talk like—like a poet. Besides, you tell me nothing new. I was thinking all that and more on my way here with my landlady. What has size to do with it? Why, when I thought of my mother after she was dead, and peered down in the place of my imagination into her grave, I saw her spirit—young, younger than I, and bodiless, and infinitely more beautiful even than she had been in my dreams, floating up out of it, free, sweet, and happy, like a flame—though shadowy. Besides, I don't see how you can help pitying men and women. They seem to fly to one another for company; and half their comfort is in their numbers."

Never in all my life had I put my thoughts into words like this; and he—a stranger.

There fell a silence between us. The natural quietude of the garden was softly settling down and down like infinitesimal grains of sand in a pool of water. It had forgotten that humans were harbouring in its solitude. And still he maintained that his words were not untrue, that he knew mankind better than I, that to fall into their ways and follow their opinions and strivings was to deafen my ears, and seal up my eyes, and lose my very self. "The Self everywhere," he said.

And he told me, whether in time or space I know not, of a country whose people were of my stature and slenderness. This was a land, he said, walled in by enormous, ice-capped mountains couching the furnace of the rising sun, and yet set at the ocean's edge. Its sand-dunes ring like dulcimers in the heat. Its valleys of swift rivers were of a green so pale and vivid and so flower-encrusted that an English—even a Kentish—spring is but a coarse and rustic prettiness by comparison. Vine and orange and trees of outlandish names gave their fruits there; yet there also willows swept the winds, and palms spiked the blue with their fans, and the cactus flourished with the tamarisk. Geese, of dark green and snow, were on its inland waters, and a bird clocked the hours of the night, and the conformation of its stars would be strange to my eyes. And such was the lowliness and simplicity of this people's habitations that the most powerful sea-glass, turned upon and searching their secret haunts from a ship becalmed on the ocean, would spy out nothing—nothing there, only world wilderness of snow-dazzling mountain-top and green valley, ravine, and condor, and what might just be Nature's small ingenuities—mounds and traceries. Yet within all was quiet loveliness, feet light as goldfinches', silks fine as gossamer, voices as of a watery beading of silence. And their life being all happiness they have no name for their God. And it seems—according to Mr Anon's account of it—that such was the ancient history of the world, that Man was so once, but had swollen to his present shape, of which he had lost the true spring and mastery, and had sunk deeper and deeper into a kind of oblivion of the mind, suffocating his past, and now all but insane with pride in his own monstrosities.

All this my new friend (and yet not so very new, it seemed)—all this he poured out to me in the garden, though I can only faintly recall his actual words, as if, like Moses, I had smitten the rock. And I listened weariedly, with little hope of understanding him, and with the suspicion that it was nothing but a Tom o' Bedlam's dream he was recounting. Yet, as if in disproof of my own incredulity, there sat I; and over the trees yonder stood Mrs Bowater's ugly little brick house; and beyond that, the stony, tapering spire of St Peter's, the High Street. And I looked at him without any affection in my thoughts, and wished fretfully to be gone. What use to be lulled with fantastic pictures of Paradise when I might have died of fear and hatred on Mrs Stocks's doorstep; when everything I said was "touching, touching"?

"Well," I mockingly interposed at last, "the farthing dip's guttering. And what if it's all true, and there is such a place, what then? How am I going to get there, pray? Would you like to mummy me and shut me up in a box and carry me there, as they used to in Basman? Years and years ago my father told me of the pygmy men and horses—the same size as yours, I suppose—who lived in caves on the banks of the Nile. But I doubt if I believed in them much, even then. I am not so ignorant as all that."

The life died out of his face, just as, because of a cloud carried up into the sky, the sunlight at that moment fled from Wanderslore. He coughed, leaning on his hands, and looked in a scared, empty, hunted fashion to right and left. "Only that you might stay," he scarcely whispered. " ... I love you."

Instinctively I drew away, lips dry, and heart numbly, heavily beating. An influence more secret than the shadow of a cloud had suddenly chilled and darkened the garden and robbed it of its beauty. I shrank into myself, cold and awkward, and did not dare even to glance at my companion.

"A fine thing," was all I found to reply, "for a toy, as you call me. I don't know what you mean."

Miserable enough that memory is when I think of what came after, for now my only dread was that he might really be out of his wits, and might make my beloved, solitary garden for ever hateful to me. I drew close my cape, and lifted my book.

"There is a private letter of mine hidden under that stone," I said coldly. "Will you please be so good as to fetch it out for me? And you are never, never to say that again."

The poor thing looked so desperately ill and forsaken with his humped shoulders—and that fine, fantastic story still ringing in my ears!—that a kind of sadness came over me, and I hid my face in my hands.

"The letter is not there," said his voice.

I drew my fingers from my face, and glared at him from between them; then scrambled to my feet. Out swam the sun again, drenching all around us with its light and heat.

"Next time I come," I shrilled at him, "the letter will be there. The thief will have put it back again! Oh, how unhappy you have made me!"