No,—fear had never found the depths of those liquid, lucent eyes, he thought. “The mountains might be civil enough,” he rejoined, “and give you their purple berries to eat, their wild white brooks to drink; but I could not answer for the black bears and snakes.”
“I think I could.”
“And this, of course, is only what you interpret the hills to mean, sitting there in their grim conclave and affording us such a narrow coronal of sky?” asked Reymund, smiling.
“I do not know,” she answered doubtfully. “I said things were real to me.”
“There must have been those like you, who first saw and believed in fairies and all the goblin people,” he said, still smiling.
“My father died before I was born,” said Orient. “Perhaps that gave me some lien upon the spiritual world.”
“Then you see bogles as well as other things,—as well as the personalities of bud and bird and granite pile? Uncanny creature! What pleasure shall I take in meeting your glance when it rests also on a dead man behind me, and on the fetch of one about to join the innumerable caravan beside me? I must take my revenge normally and in kind,—if I die before you, you shall surely have a visitation from me. How should you like that?”
“You would be just as welcome then as now,” she answered gravely.
“An equivocal compliment. Nevertheless, I accept it as a challenge. Will you promise its counterpart?”
“When I die,” said Orient, “I shall have other things to do.”