“Ah! no, monsieur. But I have heard how the great waters mutter all their secrets to their shells; and I like to think that my air-shell up there is in the confidence of the strange people one cannot see.”
Ned paused in his work, and dwelt musingly on his companion’s face.
“So,” said he, “you are a half-saint on the strength of these little odd ecstasies.”
“Indeed I am no part of a saint.”
“Now, Nicette, you must put no restraint on your speech whenever I am with you. You interest me more, I think, than anybody I have ever seen. Do you know, I have no imaginative faculty like this of yours. I am too inquisitive to dream nicely. I like to get to the bottom of things.”
Obviously there was some lure about him that drew the girl, in tentative advances, from her reserve.
“I do not think there is a bottom to things,” she said, looking up, a little breathless at her own daring. “Some day, perhaps, when monsieur thinks he has reached it, he will fall through and find himself flying.”
“Shall I?” said Ned abstractedly, for he was wrestling with a difficulty. Then he went on, with a quick change of subject,—“are you very fond of your cow?”
Nicette’s eyes opened in wonder.
“Of Madeleine? Oh yes, monsieur.”