“Look,” he said presently, “you are trembling. Come and rest with me on this stone, and set your feet with mine at its base and say to me, as I shall say to you, ‘Here on a rock I plant my love, never to be displaced.’”
He helped her to the seat, then threw himself down beside her, and, raising his arm, was beginning in perfect gravity, “Here on a rock I plant—” when, without the least warning, there came a snap, and he went backwards heels-over-head into the grass, and lay there kicking like a delirious acrobat. Some demon of perversity, working with a wedge of frost, had once split a section of the stone near through, and he had sat upon that section.
The girl shrieked and ran to his help.
“O, Louis!” she cried, “art thou hurt?”
He did not answer with the poet, “I have got a hurt o’ the inside of a deadlier sort!” It is to be feared that both he and his lady were entirely lacking in the sense of humour. He arose crestfallen, but more mortified in his faith than his vanity. The two looked at one another tragically. Then Yolande suddenly burst into tears.
“O!” she sobbed, “what were we, to liken our love to God’s Church! He has answered our arrogance with a thunderbolt. Louis, you are all dusty and covered with prickles! Something in my heart tells me that I can never, never marry you!”
“Hush!” he said desperately. “We will go back to the chapel and pray for pardon. I ought to have looked to the stone first.”
But she only sighed miserably. “That would have made no difference. Do you think you are more foreseeing than He?”
He put his hand in his pocket.
“I have lost my soldi!” he said faintly.