"Sorra a word."
"I wanted to tell you all the time ... last night, who I was."
"I wanted badly to ask."
"But I dared n't."
"And I dared n't either. What a couple of cowards we 've been. Let 's be brave now, shall we, to make up for it? I'll ask and you shall tell me. Who are you?"
She dipped an almost affectionate hand into the post-bag, and extended it partly by way of presentation.
"I 'm the post-girl," she said.
He looked at the bag, and then along the extended arm to her.
"Really?" he asked, visibly uncertain that the post-bag was not merely part of a pleasing masquerade, or that the girl might not have put herself voluntarily under its brown yoke for some purpose as inexplicable as the trudging to Cliff Wrangham by starlight.
"Really and truly," she said. "I know I ought to have told you ... at first. But I thought, perhaps..." She plucked at a blade of grass, and biting it with her small, milk-white teeth, studied the bruised green rib with lowered eyes. "... Thought perhaps you 'd taken me for somebody different. And I was frightened you might be offended when you knew who it was."