She sat on, meditating in some discomfort.

"It is no use deceiving ourselves," she thought. "We're not in the good
old Tennysonian days. There's precious little chivalry now! Men don't
idealize women as they used. They're grown far more suspicious--and
_harder_. Perhaps because women have grown so critical of them! Anyway
something's gone--what is it? Poetry? Illusion? And yet!--why is it that
men still put us off our balance?--even now--that they matter so much
less, now that we live our own lives, and can do without them? I
shouldn't be sitting here, bothering my head, if it had been another girl
who had come to help."

Slowly she gathered up her things and took her way home, while the
evening of blue and pearl fell around her, while the glow died on the
fells, and Venus came out in a sky that was still too full of light to
let any lesser stars appear.

She crossed the stepping stones, and in a river field on the farther side
she came across an old shepherd, carrying a wounded ewe across his
shoulders, and with his dog beside him. At sight of him she paused in
astonishment. He was an old friend of hers, but he belonged to a
village--the village of Mainstairs--some three miles away in the lowland
toward Pengarth. She had first come across him when sketching among some
distant fells where he had been a shepherd for more than forty years.

The old man's russet face, sharp-lined and strong, lit up as he saw her
approaching.

"Why I thowt I med coom across yer!" he said smiling. And he explained