"Do you know," she said, "I feel as if I knew you, as if I might have known you all my life. Have I never seen you before?"
"I think not," he replied, in a low voice.—Who can tell how much is seen by little eyes newly opened upon the world? Perhaps vision is clearer then than afterwards, when speech and sound and crowding thoughts come to obscure it.
"Have you always lived in these mountains?"
He answered with a slight hesitation. "I came here seventeen years ago."
"And do you never go down to the lowlands?"
"No."
"Then I can't have known you before," she said disappointedly, "because I am only seventeen myself."
A shrewder observer—Jemima for instance—might have noted his hesitancy, might have realized that coming to a place does not imply remaining there continuously.
But Jacqueline was not shrewd. She took people literally, and understood just what they intended her to understand. The art of prevarication was unknown to her; though, as has been seen, she could lie upon occasion, with a large and primitive simplicity.
"Now then," said the teacher briskly. "If you are ready, young lady, we shall go after that bullet."