"It 's my home here," she said.
"At Cliff Wrangham?" he asked, and brought his right leg over the left towards her, in attitude of increased attention.
"No-o."
She must have felt a sense of isolation in abiding by that one word; as though it were a gate snecking her off from the Spawer's friendly reach in conversation, for she passed through it almost immediately and added the specific correction: "At Ullbrig."
"Ah!" His internal eye was soaring over the Ullbrig of his remembrance in an endeavor to pounce upon stray points of association for the girl's identity. "I 'm afraid," he said, "that I don't know my Ullbrig very well. It 's a part of my education here that 's been sadly neglected. But you were n't going to walk back there alone? To-night, I mean?"
She looked at him with mild surprise.
"Oh, yes," she told him.
"Jove!" he said. "Are n't you afraid?"
"Afraid?" She gathered the word dubiously off his lips. "What of?"
"Oh," he laughed. "Of nothing at all. That 's what we 're most afraid of, as a rule, is n't it? Of the dark, for instance."