“What am I to do? Advise me, help me!”
It moved upon me, soft, and swift, and irresistible. I felt my hands imprisoned—seized as out of the grave into an assurance of human warmth and sympathy.
“For what else am I here?” demanded the fervent voice. “Have I not the prior claim? Have you never thought of me in all these years—of what you might be now, save for my interference?”
“Yes,” I whispered. “Indeed, indeed I am not one to forget.”
“Well,” he said, “I am just a vagabond at last, and desperate in romance; and you—your reason is forfeit, if not your life. Be under no delusion about it; nor about the real impotence of this good fellow to save you. Come with me, then, while there is time, and be my little sister. I am lonely in the deep woods.”
I did not move or speak, but I gazed up intently into the white bloom of his face. The strangest thought was struggling for expression in me—of some conscious gravitation, through all these years, towards an affinity which had been shadowed out to me at that first and only meeting. I felt no shyness, but only a restful confidence in his company. Was not that strange? To be brother and sister, one and indivisible in the candid sympathies of Nature. I recognised in a moment that it was that ideal relationship which had always appealed to me for the best and purest—that I could never be happy again divorced from it.
Suddenly the tears were in my eyes.
“If I could truly be your little sister,” I said, “and keep house for you, as Gretel did for the gentle shepherd who had plucked her when a flower.”
He heaved a long sigh, full of rapture.
“Quick, then! let me pluck my flower,” says he, “and run.”