"To do something for some one else."
"Well?" said she, expectantly.
"Well!" I answered.
"What's to prevent you being ambitious?" she asked.
"The fact," said I, "that there is no one else."
She stopped for a moment, and looked down the cliffside where Dandy was worrying himself with a rabbit hole. Hearing the cessation of our voices he looked up, and his nose was comical with red earth.
She laughed at him and then she said: "Isn't Dandy some one?"
"I'm constrained to find him somebody," said I.
She looked at me queerly for a moment—no, not queerly, for in her eyes, as it were, I felt the touch of her hand and why, I cannot tell you, for she is twenty-seven and I am forty-three, but a thought of my mother in no special sense just passed across my mind. Possibly it was because no woman has looked at me like that since she was alive; or maybe it was a sentimental imagination. The best thoughts we have, the best emotions, so I am told, are only sentimentality.
I could not tell you how long that glance of hers had lasted when out of the silence, which, like a tireless sentinel, stands guard upon those cliffs, there came the sound of nearing voices. They drew closer out of the immense stillness as figures come towards you out of a mist. We turned for an instant in their direction, and then as Dandy, hearing them too, rushed up the cliff and off into the darkness, barking wildly, Bellwattle looked at me and whispered—