And Desire, who was not lazy, might have fretted at the inaction had she believed him.  But she knew it was not laziness which had drawn certain new lines about the expeditioner’s mouth and deepened the old ones on his forehead.  It was not laziness which lay behind the strained look in his eyes and the sudden return of his almost vanished limp.  These things are not symptoms of indolence.  They are symptoms of nerves.  And Desire knew something of nerves.  What she did not know, in the present case, was their exciting cause.  Neither could she understand this new reticence on the part of their victim nor his reluctance to admit the obvious.  She puzzled much about these problems while the lazy one rested in the sun and the quiet, golden days wrought the magic of their cure.

And Spence, mere man that he was, fancied that she noticed nothing.  The pleasant illusion hastened his recovery.  It tended to restore a complacency, rudely disturbed by an enforced realization of his own back-sliding.  He had been quite furious upon discovering that the “little episode” of the moonlit cottage had filched from him all his new won strength and nervous stamina, leaving him sleepless and unstrung, ready to jump at the rattling of a stone.  More and more, there grew in him a fierce disdain of weakness and a cold determination to beat Nature at her own game.  Let him once again be “fit” and wily indeed would be the trick which would steal his fitness from him.

Meanwhile, laziness was as good a camouflage as anything and lying on the grass while Desire chose her name was pleasant in the extreme.

“Names,” murmured the lazy one dreamily, “are things.  When a thing is ‘named true’ its name and itself become inseparable and identical.  That is why all magic is wrought by names.  It becomes simply a matter of knowing the right ones.”

“Is that a very new idea, or a very old one?”

“All ideas are ageless, so it must be both.”

“I wonder how they named things in the very, very first?” mused Desire.  “Did they just sit in the sun, as we are sitting, and think and think, until suddenly—­they knew?”

“Very likely.  There is a legend that, in the beginning, everything was named true—­fire, water, earth, air—­so that the souls of everything knew their names and were ruled by those who could speak them.  But, as the race grew less simple and more corrupt, the true names were obscured and then lost altogether.  Only once or twice in all the ages has come some master who has known their secret—­such, perhaps, as He who could speak peace to the wind and walk upon the sea and change the water into wine.”

Desire nodded.  “Yes,” she said.  “It feels like that—­as if one had forgotten.  Sometimes when I have been in the woods alone or drifting far out on the water, where there was no sound but its own voice, it has seemed as if I had only to think—­hard—­hard—­in order to remember!  Only one never does.”