“At any rate, she has the whole world now—beauty, talent, wealth, social prestige. She is one of the most successful women in this country.”
“Do I know her name?”
“Quite well. She has been a person of consequence since you were a child.”
“I couldn't capture the whole world,” mused Lily. Maurice kissed her small fingers.
“Some one else will put it in your lap, to keep or throw away as you choose.”
The hurried tink-tank of an approaching cow-bell suggested passers. Then a whir of wheels could be heard through tangled wilderness. The girl met his lips with a lingering which trembled through all his body, and withdrew herself.
“Now I am going. Are you coming down the trail with me?”
Maurice shut the lime-kiln door, and crossed with her a grassy avenue to find among birches the ravelled ends of a path called the White Islander's Trail. You may know it first by a triangle of roots at the foot of an oak. Thence a thread, barely visible to expert eyes, winds to some mossy dead pines and crosses a rotten log. There it becomes a trail cleaving the heights, and plunging boldly up and down evergreen glooms to a road parallel with the cliff. Once, when the island was freshly drenched in rain, Lily breathed deeply, gazing down the tunnel floored with rock and pine-needles, a flask of incense. “It is like the violins!”
In that seclusion of heaven Maurice could draw her slim shape to him, for the way is so narrow that two are obliged to walk close. They parted near the wider entrance, where a stamp reared itself against the open sky, bearing a stick like a bow, and having the appearance of a crouching figure.
“There is the Indian on the trail,” said Lily. “You must go back now.”