"All his life. Then your father is not ... living?"
"He died before I was born."
She glanced at him as she spoke, for his tone had been muffled and indistinct. There was a deep furrow in his forehead which she had not seen before.
"Do you look like him?"
"No, he was dark. I am like my mother."
Thorn was looking away from her, toward the lane, where, beyond the hedge, a man was passing, half-singing, half-chanting to himself in a repressed, sepulchral voice.
"My mother died, too, when I was a little girl," she added, "so I know really very little about him."
She had forgotten to look for the Flower-of-Dream. They had come to the little lake with its mossy stones and basking, orange carp. Through the gap in the shrubbery the white witchery of Fuji-San glowed in the sun with far-faint shudderings of lilac fire. She sat down on a sunny boulder. Thorn stooped over the water, looking into its cool, green depths, and she saw him pass his hand over his brow in that familiar, half-hesitant gesture of the day before.
"Will you tell me that little?" he asked. "I think I should like to hear."
"I very seldom talk about him," she said, looking dreamily out across the distance, "but not because I don't like to. You see, knowing so little, I used to dream out the rest, so that he came to seem quite real. Does that sound very childish and fanciful?"