“All by yourself?” I repeated.
“All by myself. There wasn’t anyone else. I only found out afterwards that other people did not see the Colours.”
She leaned against the tree-hole plaiting and unplaiting chance-plucked grass stems. The children in the wood had drawn nearer. I could see them with the tail of my eye frolicking like squirrels.
“Now I am sure you will never laugh at me,” she went on after a long silence. “Nor at them.”
“Goodness! No!” I cried, jolted out of my train of thought. “A man who laughs at a child—unless the child is laughing too—is a heathen!”
“I didn’t mean that of course. You’d never laugh at children, but I thought—I used to think—that perhaps you might laugh about them. So now I beg your pardon…. What are you going to laugh at?”
I had made no sound, but she knew.
“At the notion of your begging my pardon. If you had done your duty as a pillar of the state and a landed proprietress you ought to have summoned me for trespass when I barged through your woods the other day. It was disgraceful of me—inexcusable.”
She looked at me, her head against the tree trunk—long and steadfastly—this woman who could see the naked soul.
“How curious,” she half whispered. “How very curious.”