because beauty, as he had known it, though often fair and of good report,
had bloomed for others before he came. But here was a nature fresh and
unspoiled from the hand of the potter Life.

As her head slightly turned from him again, he involuntarily noticed the
pulse beating in her neck, the rise and fall of her bosom. Life--here
was life unpoisoned by one drop of ill thought or light experience.

"Thou dost command men too," he repeated.

She stepped forward a little from the doorway and beyond him, answering
back at him:

"Oh, no, I only knit, and keep a garden, and command a little home,
that's all. . . . Won't you let me show you the island?" she added
quickly, pointing to a hillock beyond, and moving towards it. He
followed, speaking over her shoulder:

"That's what you seem to do," he answered, "not what you do." Then he
added rhetorically: "I've seen a man polishing the buckle of his shoe,
and he was planning to take a city or manoeuvre a fleet."

She noticed that he had dropped the thou, and, much as its use had
embarrassed her, the gap left when the boldness was withdrawn became
filled with regret, for, though no one had dared to say it to her before,
somehow it seemed not rude on Philip's lips. Philip? Yes, Philip she
had called him in her childhood, and the name had been carried on into
her girlhood--he had always been Philip to her.

"No, girls don't think like that, and they don't do big things," she