From sleeping badly, John Willie Garden had passed to sleeping hardly at all. From that same fear of startling her, he still did not appear in the Glyn much before his accustomed hour (though there had been times without number when he had resolved otherwise); instead, he wandered about, a mile, two miles away, sometimes setting himself a distant point to walk to, on his return from which it would surely be time he was seeking her. On the first two mornings of his absence from home he had not shaved; then he had decided that that would never do, and has sent somebody from the inn below to fetch him a bag. With the bag had come a short note from Minetta. It had merely said that June was leaving on the following Saturday, and that after that day she would be alone in the house.

He now wished he had not asked Minetta to show June that sketch. She had put it on his breakfast-plate for all the world as if he had wished to see it, instead of merely to show June how much better it was than the others. He didn't think that Minetta cared in the least how he spent his time, but she was so sharp, and queer as well as sharp. She watched things without taking any part in them. The more self-absorbed the actors showed themselves, the more keenly interested Minetta became. In many respects she took after her father. Edward Garden too had that habit of poking and prying into people's tastes and enjoyments and passions and desires, noting and understanding them while remaining himself inaccessible to such weaknesses. It wouldn't greatly have surprised John Willie to learn that Minetta guessed what he was about up Delyn.

The curious thing was that, if that were so, he didn't think that Minetta would disapprove. She would look as it were over the tops of a pair of imaginary glasses, and under them, and finally through them, and her ironical glance would say as plainly as words, "This seems to be a love-affair." She would neither disapprove nor approve, or, if she did approve, it would be of his provision of entertainment for her. Her disapproval would appear only if John Willie involved her in something that would not "do."

This brought John Willie straightway back face to face with his old and torturing dilemma, of having something "on"—but something that would not "do."

A hundred times he had fought it out, and a hundred times he had come to the conclusion that, while Minetta might resemble her not quite human father, he, John Willie, was his mother's son. His mother would have been entirely for that "No" that a hundred times had gained the day. After each of these victories he had been on the point of turning his back on the mountains and of not returning as long as he knew her to be there. These impulses had now nothing to do with his fear of startling her. They were born of that stiff and indispensable code. He had only to thank her for a few breakfasts, to tell her he was going, to wish her well, and all would be over. He found rest in the thought. He might suffer an ache or two afterwards, but it would be the best way out. It had been his first impulse, and it had proved to be his last conclusion. He would consider it settled so. It would be much the best course to act like an ordinary young man.

For several days he had said that.

He said it again on the morning when he shaved off half a week's growth of beard.

Once more he had slept within a stone's-throw of the hut. There had been light showers during the night, but hardly enough to call a break of the weather; the drops twinkled on fern and grass and spiders'-webs and tiny flowers, but the ground was still as dry as tinder. As he shaved, with the little mirror of his dressing-bag hung on a hazel, he reflected that it was only half-past seven, and that the Llyn ought to be a good colour for fishing. There would be plenty of time for a cast or two before saying good-bye. But his rod was in the locked hut, of which she had the key. No matter. Since he had now come to his decision, it would make no difference did he seek her in the Glyn a little earlier than usual. He would then be able to get away earlier in order to say good-bye to the neglected June.

He was heartily glad it was all over. The only possible course seemed so plain that he wondered now what he had been tormenting himself about all this time. Smiling a little, he even thought of all the awkwardnesses and dissimulations and machinations and deceits he was by one stroke escaping. He would have felt rather a brute had he come upon Dafydd Dafis one day, and asked him how he was getting on, and, casually, what had become of that little niece or cousin of his, whose name he would have had to make a lying pretence of having forgotten. It would have been behaving rather off-handedly to June, to see her for the first two days only of her stay and then to let her go without as much as seeing her off. It would be better that Minetta should not have to write home saying that John Willie was away (fishing) and she alone in the house, but she was quite all right. It would be better to think of the things that would permanently "do"—altogether more comfortable and satisfactory not to have to call himself, in the waking hours of nights in the years ahead, or in the days to come when business claimed him, by a disquieting name. It was not as if there were not plenty of other things to think of. This particular aspect of life was far too much dwelt on. Percy Briggs dwelt on it too much, he himself had dwelt too much on it. He wasn't sure that he hadn't been getting even a little morbid about it. Not every lovely flower is picked because it is lovely and then thrown wilting away again. John Willie had come to his senses. It had taken him some time, but he was all right again now. He wondered how those people at the inn below had been looking after his horse. They'd probably let him get fat and lazy. Well, he would give him a twisting on the way home. Too much inaction is good for neither horse nor man....

He finished shaving, and began to whistle as he packed his tackle and strapped the case. He would leave the case where it was, and pick it up on his way back. He would take the boat, pull straight across, get it over, and then have a swinging walk down to the inn. Despite his moping wanderings, he felt the need of a really good hard walk.

He strode down to the lake, unfastened the boat, dashed the waterdrops from the thwart with his cap, and pushed off.

It was a brilliant, if broken, sky. Up the mountain-side the light mists were quickly evaporating, and a great crag of dazzling white cloud, shaped like the north of Scotland on a map, was perfectly reduplicated in the glassy Llyn. As if the surface of the water had had a tenuity without abating a jot of its crystal clearness, the smooth V from the bows seemed to shear through something that, even when the water settled to rest again, did not return; there fled at each stroke an intact perfection. He altered the boat's course, and the reflection of the edge of Delyn broke into long smooth stripes. He altered it again, and an invisible comb seemed to pass through the towering inverted cloud. His wake was a dancing of broken glittering facets. He stood in towards the shaly spur; a few more strong strokes and he grounded abruptly; and he gathered up his boots and stockings from the bottom of the boat, stepped out, and made fast at the bottom of the Glyn.

The showers had swollen the stream a little, and mossy stones that had been dry the day before were lapped by the water, and pools came farther up his calf. But suddenly at a thought he stopped. In the new circumstances it was a new thought. She did not expect him for some hours yet; it might be better—in case of his coming upon her as she might not wish to be come upon—to give a call. On second thoughts he was sure that he ought to give a call. He opened his mouth——

But it was not necessary. Suddenly he saw her twenty yards ahead. She had probably been up for hours, and had got her bathe over long since.

But even that glimpse of her through the leaves had been as it were two glimpses. In the first of them he had seen that she was there; in the second he had noted that her appearance was not her usual appearance. She was no longer wearing the black dress of Philip Lacey's flower-shop, but that old blouse, unconfined at the waist, and again, as on that day when she had started back from the door of the hut, her legs and feet were bare. Four trout lay on the grass beside her, one of them still fluttering. She was stroking the drops of water from her forearms, and wiping her hands on her old striped petticoat.

He did not call, but all in a moment she looked round as quickly as if he had done so. At first he thought she was going to start to her feet and run, but she remained seated. Then a bough intervened. He put it aside behind him, threw his boots and stockings ashore, and climbed the bank.

"Hallo, Ynys," he said, as he sat down beside her. "I'm a bit early, but I've got to get off soon. They want me down there. There are some people I must see before they go."

Then he wondered whether, after all, he had not startled her. In her eyes was once more that look that had been there that other day, when she had fallen back, though no farther than a cat falls back. If that was so he must reassure her by going on talking. Without pausing, he continued.

"Yes, I shall have to get off by eleven. I've not been home, you see. Couldn't stand going back to that place, so I just made myself comfortable by the hut there.—I say, I hope you didn't get wet with that rain in the night?"

Simply, freely, naturally, and without a second thought, he put out his hand to feel whether her petticoat was dry. He supposed she slept in her petticoat, and that his early visit had not allowed her time to change.

But she crouched back so swiftly that he also fell a little back, surprised. He forgot that his own words, "I'm a bit early," raised twenty questions—questions of why he was there at all, of how it had come to pass that a variation in his habit was a thing to be remarked on, of why his announcement that he must be off early seemed even to himself a breach of something that had never been established, but only tacitly allowed. He forgot these things, stared at her, and suddenly exclaimed, "Why, what's the matter?" Had she feared that he was about to put his hand upon her? One of her elbows had shot up as if she would have defended herself, and the frightened seaweed eyes looked at him over the guarding forearm. Her other hand, behind her on the grass, supported her. So they sat, she trembling, he covering her with an astonished stare.

Then, as quickly as she had raised it, she dropped the defending arm. She made a swift clutch at her petticoats and scrambled a foot farther away from him. Her breast fluttered like that of the still living trout, and her hand was clasped betrayingly about one foot hidden in the short striped petticoat.

And in a twink John Willie saw his mistake. It was not from his advanced hand that she had shrunk. It was from the resting of his eyes—those eyes that, even as she had drawn herself back, had already rested. Those eyes, of Scandinavian blue, had sought hers again, of the wet greenish brown of the seaweed of the shore.

He spoke quietly.

"Come here, Ynys," he said.

She did not move.

"Come here, Ynys," he said again.

Her trembling became violent.

"Come here, Ynys—I want——"

He did not finish. His hand shot quickly forth. The next moment it held what she had striven to hide. He was gazing at the silver mark that ran round the outer edge of her foot near the little toe as a vein runs round a pebble.

She had twisted her body so that her face lay on the grass, covered with her hands. She made one feeble movement to draw the foot from his hand, and then lay still. When, presently, he put it gently down, she made no further attempt to hide it; what was the good, since he had seen? It lay still now, a little crinkled brown sole with bits of vegetation pressed into it, and, running across it, that old thread, silver, like the wedding-ring of her mother—that hard little sole that had made the kidney-shaped footprints on the Llanyglo beach, that had pattered after pedestrians on the road, and that would take to the roads again rather than be pressed into a shoe and walk the pavements of a town.

Yet, though he had seen the foot, she seemed determined he should not see her face too. Presently she was conscious that he was trying to do so, that he was gently trying to draw away the concealing hands. That she resisted. "Ynys! Ynys!" he was saying remorsefully in her ear. She lay quite still, and "Ynys! Ynys!" he continued to repeat, over and over again.

At last he heard that uniquely soft voice of hers in reply. She spoke into the grass, not sobbingly, only a little dully.

"I 'ould not show you," she begged him—movingly begged him—to believe.

"Ynys—dear!—--"

"Indeed you ask me, one day, if I take off my boots and stock-kings, and I 'ould not——"

"No, no——" he soothed her.

"I not show nobody, in lot-t of years, never." She turned her face to him for a moment; the anger of a fury lurked there for him had he not believed her. "I not show nobody, if they kill me," she went on. "Lot-t of years I hate it——" the vindictiveness of the single word died away, and he scarcely heard what came next, "—but I not hate it any more now——"

His answer was to rise suddenly to his knees, to stoop again, and to kiss the foot he had innocently maimed. He was conscious as he did so of its quick little pressure against his mouth....

The next moment his arm was about her shoulder, and he was gently seeking to see her face again.

"Cariad!" he murmured, his lips to her ear.

And he knew that by no other means could it have come to pass. "Lot-t of years I hate it—but I not hate it any more." She had hated the foot for its disfigurement. She had loved it for him.

There was no question of Yes or No as they ate their breakfast together; it was as it was, and neither guilt nor innocence had any part in it. From time to time, as they sat, he flung his arms about her shoulders as frankly as children embrace, and she suffered the crushing with lips parted and eyes immeasurably far away. The black pool was flecked with froth; it danced over the whitey-green ebullition at the foot of the swollen fall; and two dragon-flies, one blue as a scarab and the other like a darting twig of green metal, hovered and set and spun. There seemed to be no wind, but the great country of white cloud up aloft had advanced, and a soft gloom filled the Glyn. They did not wash up; impatiently John Willie tossed the platter they had shared aside; and they embraced again.

Midday did not find John Willie on his way to Llanyglo, nor yet did he see June off by the three o'clock train. By three o'clock he was on the summit of Delyn again, under the same rock where he had tried, as if by accident, to touch her hand. She had put on her shoes, but not her stockings, for the climb, but he had drawn them off again, and once more she lay, luxuriating with her foot under his hand. Even now she did not talk very much. She had only one thing to say, with lovely monotony and very few words to say it in; she strayed no farther from her little store of English than to say, over and over again, "Boy bach!" with the greenish-brown eyes slavishly on his, and her parted lips hurrying out the diminutive before he crushed them again. She started from her dream once, as a stray sheep close behind them gave a call like a rich oboe; then she relapsed into it again. The shadows lay still and leagues long over the rumple of mountains, and she had not changed, and had promised that she would not again change, that unfastened bodice and short and faded old petticoat.

So June steamed away, while Ynys's face was framed in John Willie's arm on the summit of Delyn.

They descended to the Glyn again between the afternoon and the early evening, and with each step as they dropped down the mountain a silence grew and deepened on them. He knew its meaning, if she did not, and, back by the pool again, he first cleaned the forgotten platter (which she tried to prevent), and then stood before her as he had stood when once, with an abrupt, "Nos da," he had stridden away. And in that pause of gazing silence he knew how much was packed—his Yes, his No, hers too; all that lay behind them, all that lay before. For him, there lay enwrapped in it that slight black figure he had seen under the crimson pier-light; his searching for her; his finding her; his struggles, his decision, and then, even in the act of his relinquishment, his wonderful recovery of her. And her memory took a farther flight still. She saw herself, a little girl, sitting with a bandaged foot upon a chair, while a testy girl not two years older than herself drew her likeness. She remembered the unendurable length of those half-hours—unendurable, save that occasionally there looked in at the door or passed the window a cowslip-haired boy, with hard blue eyes that would stare down even his own conscience and none be the wiser, a conquering boy, of a race so habituated to conquest that it takes with the sword-hand and carelessly tosses twice as much back with the other. That was what it meant to her, that silver mark that ran round the edge of her foot as a vein runs round the edge of a pebble....

And for the future? His future might be anything, but hers could be one thing only. For the gipsy loves never but the once. In all but love, the waters of the world are not more unstable than she; in love, the rocks are not more irremovable. Therefore she has no past and no regrets. She has no regrets, for there is no scar upon her heart—how can there be a scar, when a scar is a healing, and this wound is never healed, but ever new, ever quivering? And she has no past—how can she have a past when all is a poignant and lovely present, that endures to the end?...

There was so little for John Willie to do. He had only to go away without kissing her again.

Kiss her, however, he must not—he was only an ordinary young man——

He knew it, and——

He passed his arms about her waist and drew her down by his side.

It was dark in the Glyn long before the light had faded from the open hillside above. In Llyn Delyn not a fish rose to break that dark and intact perfection. The fall into the pool diminished a little in volume, and mossy cushions that had lately been covered began to rise out of the water again. And a heart was laid quiveringly open where formerly only a foot had been maimed. She was twice conquered, for she was Welsh and woman too. In the hearts of the men of her race the fame of their story still lives, and while it lives strife will not cease. As their own proverb says, what the sword took, the tongue will take back again.

But the woman goes with the land.