and, indeed, I had a strange interest in the fretful, silly, lovely girl with me, and in what lay before us.  She prattled on, and seemed to be recovering her spirits and her confidence at the sights around us.  If I could but find anything that would draw her out of her restless mood into the peace of the morning!  She had a charm for me, though her impatience and desire for amusement seemed uninteresting enough; and I found myself talking to her as an elder brother might, with terms of familiar endearment, which she seemed to be grateful for.  It was strange in a way, and yet it all appeared natural.  The more we drew away from the hills, the happier she became.  “Ah,” she said once, “we have got out of that hateful place, and now perhaps we may be more comfortable,”—­and when we came down beside the stream to a grove of trees, and saw something which seemed like a road beneath us, she was delighted.  “That’s more like it,” she said, “and now we may find some real people perhaps,”—­she turned to me with a smile—­“though you are real enough too, and very kind to me; but I still have an idea that you are a clergyman, and are only waiting your time to draw a moral.”

IX

Now before I go on to tell the tale of what happened to us in the valley there were two very curious things that I observed or began to observe.

The first was that I could not really see into the girl’s thought.  I became aware that though I could see into the thought of Amroth as easily and directly as one can look into a clear sea-pool, with all its rounded pebbles and its swaying fringes of seaweed, there was in the girl’s mind a centre of thought to which I was not admitted, a fortress of personality into which I could not force my way.  More than that.  When she mistrusted or suspected me, there came a kind of cloud out from the central thought, as if a turbid stream were poured into the sea-pool, which obscured her thoughts from me, though when she came to know me and to trust me, as she did later, the cloud was gradually withdrawn; and I perceived that there must be a perfect sacrifice of will, an intention that the mind should lie open and unashamed before the thought of one’s friend and companion, before the vision can be complete.  With Amroth I desired to conceal nothing, and he had no concealment from me.  But with the girl it was different.  There was something in her heart that she hid from me, and by no effort could I penetrate it; and I saw then that there is something at the centre of the soul which is our very own, and into which God Himself cannot even look, unless we desire that He should look; and even if we desire that He should look into our souls, if there is any timidity or shame or shrinking about us, we cannot open our souls to Him.  I must speak about this later, when the great and wonderful day came to me, when I beheld God and was beheld by Him.  But now, though when the girl trusted me I could see much of her thought, the inmost cell of it was still hidden from me.