He laughed. “No, indeed I shouldn’t. I’m a hedgerow chap. I move by night mostly.”
“Well, but—you might be within a mile of me, and I should never know it.”
“Yes, you would, of course,” he said, simply. “You’d know by the trail.”
“What trail?”
“Don’t you know that? I’ll show you. Old Borrow calls it the patteran, and swears he got it from a gipsy girl called Ursula. You needn’t believe him; I don’t. But the trail is certain. A woman who lived in a cave at Granada showed it to me. Look here.” He plucked up a handful of grass. “Here’s a four-went way”—he marked it with his finger in the dust. “Now watch”—he scattered the grass, which took, roughly, the form of a curved pointer. “You see that on a road—it means the way I am gone. But I do mine with leaves, when leaves there are—with leaves from the sunny side of a hedgerow. You can always tell them.” Her brows inquired—she was intensely interested. “Dunce, they are bigger of course, and darker. I use them because the gipsies, who are everywhere, use leaves, too, but never take the trouble to select them. Now you’ll always know my trail by that. Do you see?”
She clasped her hands together—her eyes danced. “How splendid! How glorious! Then we have a language. I can find you whenever I want you. For if I wanted you very badly, I could set a patteran for you, couldn’t I?” He nodded. She said in a low voice, “You don’t know how strong you have made me—you can never know. Thank you a thousand times.”
“Not a bit,” he said, lightly. “If we’re friends, you are entitled to know my little games.”
“And may I speak to you like that—when I go anywhere?”
“Do. We share.”
She sighed. “How can I ever thank you!”