She looked across the brook at her companion, now sitting back on his heels, and saw that there had emerged from his grime a thin, tanned, high-nosed face, topped by drab-colored hair of no great abundance and lighted by a pair of extraordinarily clear, gray eyes. She perceived no more in the face at that moment, because the man, as he looked up at her, became nothing but a dazzled mirror from which was reflected back to her the most flattering image of her own appearance. Almost actually she saw herself as she appeared to him, a wood-nymph, kneeling by the flowing water, vital, exquisite, strong, radiant in a cool flush, her uncovered hair gleaming in a thousand loosened waves. Like most comely women of intelligence Sylvia was intimately familiar with every phase of her own looks, and she knew down to the last blood-corpuscle that she had never looked better. But almost at once came the stab that Felix Morrison was not the man who was looking at her, and the heartsick recollection that he would never again be there to see her. Her moment of honest joy in being lovely passed. She stood up with a clouded face, soberly pulled down her sleeves, and picked up her hat.
"Oh, why don't you leave it off?" said the man across the brook.
"You'd be so much more comfortable!" She knew that he meant her hair
was too pretty to cover, and did not care what he meant. "All right,
I'll carry it," she assented indifferently.
He did not stir, gazing up at her frankly admiring. Sylvia made out, from the impression he evidently now had of her, that her face had really been very, very dirty; and at the recollection of that absurd ascent of the mountain by those two black-faced, twig-chewing individuals, a return of irrepressible laughter quivered on her lips. Before his eyes, as swiftly, as unaccountably, as utterly as an April day shifts its moods, she had changed from radiant, rosy wood-goddess to saddened mortal and thence on into tricksy, laughing elf. He burst out on her, "Who are you, anyhow?"
She remembered with a start. "Why, that's so, Molly didn't mention my name—isn't that like Molly! Why, I'm Sylvia Marshall,"
"You may be named Sylvia Marshall!" he said, leaving an inference in the air like incense.
"Well, yes, to be sure," rejoined Sylvia; "I heard somebody only the other day say that an introduction was the quaintest of grotesques, since people's names are the most—"
He applied a label with precision. "Oh, you know Morrison?"
She was startled at this abrupt emergence of the name which secretly filled her mind and was aware with exasperation that she was blushing. Her companion appeared not to notice this. He was attempting the difficult feat of wiping his face on the upper part of his sleeve, and said in the intervals of effort: "Well, you know my name. Molly didn't forget that."
"But I did," Sylvia confessed. "I was so excited by the fire I never noticed at all. I've been racking my brains to remember, all the way up here."
For some reason the man seemed quite struck with this statement and eyed her with keenness as he said: "Oh—really? Well, my name is Austin Page." At the candid blankness of her face he showed a boyish flash of white teeth in a tanned face. "Do you mean to say you've never heard of me?"