How much longer she would have continued in this strain I do not know. For I sprang to my feet.
"If it is to be another lecture," I cried, "I accept the conclusion before it is reached. I can guess at it. Heels are your only wear, and the taller the better. Sailors should be enjoined by law to wear them, and they alone preserve the rope-dancer from a sure and inevitable death."
"A wiseacre first," says she, ticking off my qualities upon her fingers, "and now a humorist! Well there! a salad bowl of all the estimable virtues estimably jumbled. And meanwhile," she asked innocently, "are we not wasting time?"
I well-nigh gasped at her audacity; for who was to blame, if not she with the heels? However, this time I was sufficiently wise to keep silence, leaving it to experience to reprove her, as it most surely would. In which conviction I was right, for more than once she tripped on the grass as we descended; halfway down she reluctantly allowed me to assist her with a hand, and as we two moved along the side of Mosedale Beck at the entrance into Wastdale, she wrenched her ankle. The pain of the wrench luckily was not severe, and lasted no great while. She was in truth more startled than hurt, for we were treading the narrowest steep path, and at the side the rocks fell clear for about twenty feet to the torrent.
Thereupon she gave in and allowed me to go forward to a farmhouse lying at no great distance in Wastdale, and procure for her foot-gear of a more suitable kind. And comical enough it looked when she put it on, but I dared not laugh or so much as give hint of a smile, since I saw that her eyes were on the alert to catch me; for the worthy housewife hearing a story that I made up about a young girl who was travelling in a great haste across Ennerdale to visit a father who lay sick beyond there, which story was altogether a lie, though every word of it was truth, made me a present of a pair of her own boots and would take no money for them.
These Dorothy put on. I slipped those she had been wearing into the pockets of my great-coat, and making a hurried meal off some provisions which Mary Tyson had added to the bundle, we again set out.
I was now still more inclined to push forward at our topmost speed, for it was well past midday, and the tokens of foul weather which I had noted in the morning had become yet more distinct. The clearness had gone from the day, the clouds, woolly and grey, sulked upon the mountain-tops and crept down the sides; the wind had suddenly fallen; there was a certain heaviness in the air, as of the expectation of a storm. We went forward into the valley. When we were halfway to the church, a puff of wind, keen and shrewd, blew for an instant in our faces, and then another and another. But that last breath did not die like the rest; it blew continuously, and gathered violence as it blew.
The yew-trees in the churchyard resumed their tossing; we were so near that I could hear the creaking of their boughs. I looked anxiously towards the gap through which we were to pass to Eskdale. It was still clear of the mist, but where a shrub grew, or a tree reached out a branch on the slope beneath the gap, I saw the wind evident as a beating rain; and even as I looked, the gap filled—filled in a second—not with these slow, licking mists, but with a column of tempest that drove exultant, triumphing, and now and again in the midst of it I perceived a whirling gleam of white like foam of the sea.
I looked forwards to the church, backwards to the house. The church was the nearer. I took Dorothy by the elbow.
"Run!" I cried.