"Yes."
"Are you in earnest?"
"I am in earnest, and," added he, somewhat dubiously, "I think I am in my right mind."
He did not say more just then, but looked up and down the road in his search for someone. In a moment he turned to her, and a current of amusement seemed to cross his mind and gleamed out of his blue eyes as he lifted them to hers. "I believe when I saw you I came to you for protection."
The light from pink tracts of sunset fell brightly upon field and river, but this couple did not notice it at all.
"There is no bogie so fearful as the unknown," she cried. "You frightened me, Mr. Trenholme."
"There is no bogie in the case," he said, "nor ghost I suppose; but I saw someone. I don't know how to tell you; it begins so far back, and I may alarm you when I tell you that there must be someone in this neighbourhood of yours who has no right to be here." Then to her eager listening he told the story that he had once written to his brother, and added to it the unlooked for experience of the last half-hour. His relation lacked clearness of construction. Sophia had to make it lucid by short quick questions here and there.
"I'm no good," he concluded, deprecating his own recital. "Robert has all the language that's in our family; but do you know, miss, what it is to see a face, and know that you know it again, though you can't say what it was like? Have you the least notion how you would feel on being fooled a second time like that?"
The word of address that he had let fall struck her ear as something inexplicable which she had not then time to investigate; she was aware, too, that, as he spoke fast and warmly, his voice dropped into some vulgarity of accent that she had not noticed in it before. These thoughts glanced through her mind, but found no room to stay, for there are few things that can so absorb for the time a mind alive to its surroundings as a bit of genuine romance, a fragment of a life, or lives, that does not seem to bear explanation by the ordinary rules of our experience.
That mind is dulled, not ripened, by time that does not enter with zest into a strange story, and the more if it is true. If we could only learn it, the most trivial action of personality is more worthy of our attention than the most magnificent of impersonal phenomena, and, in healthy people, this truth, all unknown, probably underlies that excitement of interest which the affairs of neighbours create the moment they become in any way surprising.