She smiled.

"Ay, and he's a poet too."

"So?" she said. "I did not know. He is very young."

"He's a man of very high ideels."

She puzzled at the word, and then smiled. "He is like many of
our young men in Russia, the students--his mind is in a ferment
and he does not know what he wants. But he is brave."

This seemed to Dickson's loyal soul but a chilly tribute.

"I think he is in love with me," she continued.

He looked up startled, and saw in her face that which gave him a view
into a strange new world. He had thought that women blushed when
they talked of love, but he eyes were as grave and candid as a boy's.
Here was one who had gone through waters so deep that she had
lost the foibles of sex. Love to her was only a word of ill omen,
a threat on the lips of brutes, an extra battalion of peril in
an army of perplexities. He felt like some homely rustic who
finds himself swept unwittingly into the moonlight hunt of
Artemis and her maidens.

"He is a romantic," she said. "I have known so many like him."

"He's no that," said Dickson shortly. "Why he used to be aye