“By the best token in the world. He has told me so.”
“Ah!” She looked at me attentively a moment, as if by that means she might discover the reason.
“Then in that case he will probably do as you say. If he loved you,” she smiled, “he would expect you to do as he said.”
She loosened her feather coat, shaking out the wet, and took from Evarra’s wall an oblong piece of cloth, brown and yellow barred like the streakings of sunlight on the bark of pines, and disposed it so that, with the folds lying close and across the slender body and the two loose ends falling over the shoulders, she looked like some brooding moth that bides the rain under a sheltering tree.
“You are so much more like us,” said she, “than I would have expected; so much more understanding. Have you Far-Seeing?”
“How Far-Seeing?”
“There are some among us,” she said, considering, “who can lie in their beds at night and hear the deer crossing at Lower Fern; some who can stand in their doors and see the face of a man moving on the cliffs at Leaping Water. But I am one who can see trouble coming before the bearer of it has reached Broken Tree. Have you such?”
“I have heard of them.”
“Do you know then if they see better or worse, for loving?”
I could not tell her that, though I wished to, since she made such a point of it. I had to content myself with asking her how it was with herself.