“Indeed we have not!  The dog would have torn it to bits.  I assure you the shawl of the venerated ancestress was in the canoe before I was.”

“Then wrap yourself up.  It is wonderful how cool the nights are.”

Esther was not cold.  But it is sometimes pleasant to be commanded.  This is what enables man to persist in a certain pleasing delusion regarding woman’s natural attitude.  When she occasionally pleases herself by a simulation of subjection he immediately thrills with pride, crying, “Aha!  I have her mastered!” Of course he finds out his mistake later.

It pleased Esther, though not cold, to wrap herself in the shawl and it pleased Callandar to see her do it.  I assure you it left the whole question of the subjection of women quite untouched.

The moon knew all about it but, feminine herself, she favoured the deception.  Around the girl’s dark head she drew a circle of light.  The branching tendrils of her hair, all alive and fanlike now in the coolness of the night, made a nimbus of black and silver from which her shadowed face shone like a faint pure pearl.  As he seemed younger, so did she seem older; under the moon she was no longer a child, but a woman with mysterious eyes.

An impulse came to him—­the rare impulse of confidence!  Suddenly it seemed that what he had mistaken for self-sufficiency had been in reality loneliness.  He had learned to live to himself not because he was of himself sufficient but because no one else, save the Button Moulder, had ever come within speaking distance.  Lorna Sinnet, for all his admiration of her, had established no claim upon his confidence, yet now, with this young girl, whom he had known but a few weeks, a new need developed—­a need to talk of himself!  A primitive need indeed, but, like all primitive needs, compelling.

We need not follow the history.  Perhaps, reported, it would not seem very lucid.  There were blanks, unsaid things, twists of phrase, eloquent nothings which, wonderfully understandable in themselves, do not report well.  Somehow he must have made it plain, for Esther understood it and understood him, too, in a way which we, who have never sailed with him under the moon, cannot hope to do.  Faults of expression are no hindrance to this kind of understanding.  He did not talk well, was clumsy, not at all eloquent, but magically she reconstructed the hopes and dreams of his ambitious youth.  From a few bald phrases she fashioned the thunderbolt which shattered them, saw him stunned, then alive again, struggling.  With every ready imagination she leaped full upon the fires of an ambition which accepted no check but fed upon difficulty and overleapt obstacles.  Between stories of his early college life, her sympathy sensed the deadly strain which his narrative missed and, long before he mentioned it, her foresight had descried the coming of hard won success.