"Ah, it is real to you! I, too, forgot New York when I first stumbled on it. I even looked for watercress. But it knows no such purity, poor little brook! I've had to pretend with it, as I've pretended with the lake. The landscape-gardener was a clever fellow. He makes you believe there are distances out there—winding channels, unplumbed depths; he cheats you into thinking you have a forest at your back. Sometimes he has almost persuaded me to cast a clumsy line into that thicket yonder."
Jean's look returned to him quickly. He was smiling, but with an undercurrent of gravity.
"You know it well," she said.
"I ought. It was here, the summer after we met, that I came to realize something of what I had asked you to do. I began to study refuges. I went to such as I could, boys' places, mainly; I even tried to get sight or word of you. Somehow, though, I never came at the right official, and it seemed that men weren't welcome. I learned a few things, however. I grubbed among reports; I found out what your daily life was like, what your companions must be, and once I saw a newspaper account of a riot. But of you I heard nothing. How could I? I did not even know your name—I, your judge!"
The girl moved toward the border of the lake and for a space stood looking dreamily into its tranquil counterfeit of changing foliage and September sky. To the miracle of their meeting was added the revelation that even as he had filled her thoughts in the dark days, so had she possessed his.
"Will you sit here?" he asked, again beside her. "I want to hear the whole story—the story which began back among the other birches."
"It began farther back than there."
"Not for me."
"But it should. If you thought about me at all, you must have wondered how I came to be in a refuge uniform."
"I wondered, yes; but I never really cared. I could see with my own eyes what you were."