She shook her head.
"It is not yours," she answered slowly. "I am sure of that."
I looked at her quickly.
"What do you mean?"
"Just what I say," she answered gravely. "Men and women to whom the present is sufficient surely cannot achieve very much in life. All the time they must concentrate powers which need expansion. I think that it must be those who try to climb the walls, those even who tear their fingers and their hearts in the great struggle for freedom, who can make themselves capable of great things, even if escape is impossible. But I do not think that escape is so impossible after all, is it? There have been men, and women too, who have lived in all times, to whom there have been no to-morrows or any yesterdays. Only it seems rather hard that life for those who seek it must always be a battle!"
I did not answer her for several minutes. It was true, then, that the old days had passed away. Isobel, the child whom we had known and loved so well, had disappeared. It was Isobel the incomprehensible who was taking her place. What might the change not mean for us?...
Later we walked back over an open heath yellow with gorse, and faintly pink with the promise of the heather to come. Isobel carried her hat in her hand. She walked with her head thrown back, and a smile playing every now and then upon her lips. She was so completely absorbed that I found myself every now and then watching her, half expecting, I believe, to find some physical change to accord with that other more mysterious evolution. She walked with all the grace of long limbs and unfettered clothing. Her figure, though perfectly graceful, and with that same peculiar distinction which had first attracted me, was as yet wholly immature. But in the face itself there were signs of a coming change. Wherein it might lie I could not tell, but it was there, an intangible and wholly elusive thing. I think that a certain fear of it and what it might mean oppressed me with the sense of coming trouble. I was more fully conscious then than ever before of the moral responsibility of our peculiar charge.
We crossed a straight dusty road, cleaving the rolling moor like a belt of ribbon. Isobel looked thoughtfully along it.
"I wonder," she said, "when Arthur will come down!"
The folly of a man is a thing sometimes outside his own power of control. A second before I had been wondering of whom and what she had been thinking.