"Little girl," he said—"would you like to come here pretty often and learn Greek, and about the Greeks?"
Halcyone bounded from her chair with joy.
"But of course I would!" she said. "And I am not stupid—not really stupid Mademoiselle says, when I want to learn things."
"No—I dare say you are not stupid," the old man said. "So it is a bargain then; I shall teach you about my friends the Greeks, and you shall teach me about the green trees, and your friends the rabbits and the beetles."
Then those instinctive good manners of Halcyone's came uppermost, inherited, like her slender shape and balanced head, from that long line of La Sarthe ancestors, and she thanked the old man with a quaint, courtly, sweetly pedantic grace. Then she got up to go—
"I like being here—and may I come again to-morrow?" she said afterwards. "I must go now or they will be disagreeable and perhaps make difficulties."
The old man watched her as she curtsied to him and vaulted through the window again, and on down the path, and through the hole in the paling, without once turning round. Then he muttered to himself:
"A woman thing who refrains from looking back!—Yes, I fear she has a soul."
Then he returned to his pipe and his Aristotle.