He seemed interested.
"Have you? Haven't one with you?"
"No."
"Always go armed. Now here's a golden opportunity gone to waste."
She smiled shyly.
"I can repeat one though."
"Can you? Better yet! Recite one."
She sat down near him, but not too near, and began in a soft hesitant voice to repeat a poem which was full of feminine sadness and wistfulness. As she went on Mason turned his face toward her, and her eyes fell and her voice faltered.
"That's glorious!" he said. "Go on."
The wind swept up the slope and through the leaning white bodies of the birches with a sadness like the poem. The wild barley bowed and streamed in the wind like an old man's beard; the poem struck deep into secret moods, incommunicable in words—and music came to carry the words. The girl's eyes were sweet and serious and the lovely lines of her lips shifted and wavered.