would know he never could have loved her. The old illusion gone, they were strangers, crude and entire. But he would give her her due—she would have her due from him.
She was brilliant as he had not known her. She showed him nests: a jenny wren’s in a low bush.
“See this jinty’s!” she exclaimed.
He was surprised to hear her use the local name. She reached carefully through the thorns, and put her finger in the nest’s round door.
“Five!” she said. “Tiny little things.”
She showed him nests of robins, and chaffinches, and linnets, and buntings; of a wagtail beside the water.
“And if we go down, nearer the like, I will show you a kingfisher’s. . . .”
“Among the young fir trees,” she said, “there’s a throstle’s or a blackie’s on nearly every bough, every ledge. The first day, when I had seen them all, I felt as if I mustn’t go in the wood. It seemed a city of birds: and in the morning, hearing them all, I thought of the noisy early markets. I was afraid to go in my own wood.”
She was using the language they had both of them invented. Now it was all her own. He had done with it. She did not mind his silence, but was always dominant, letting him see her wood. As they came along a marshy path where forget-me-nots were opening in a rich blue drift: “We know all the birds, but there are many flowers we can’t find out,” she said. It was half an appeal to him, who had known the names of things.
