“Life has frightened you,” he said one day.
“How do you know that?” she asked, with a quick glance.
He smiled.
“You are like an Æolian harp set in the wind, my dear.”
“Only you can hear it.”
“Every one hears it.”
She shook her head.
“No; only you.”
“That's as may be,” he said, with a laugh. “Anyhow, something has frightened you. What is it?”
Stella rose—she had learned to walk; the hours of her exercises had been the gayest in her day—and touched him lightly with her fingers on the shoulder, and went and stood by the great window of the drawing-room and looked out at her sky and sea. The Great High Favourite, with his uncanny insight, had read her truly. Womanlike, she did not know whether to resent his surprising of her innermost secret or to love him for it. She was understood; that was balm. Yet what right had he to understand? The question was a drop of gall. The pure spirit of her flew to the chosen companion of her dreams; something—the nature of which she was unaware—sex-instinct—forbade too close an intimacy in things real and tangible. And there was a touch of resentment, too, in an outer circle of her mind. Why had he given her no warning of the Threatening Land? He had allowed her to step ignorantly upon its thorns, and her feet still bled.