We sat together presently, very unwisely, in the snow under the old hawthorn—at least I sat on the snow and Ira on me. But we were both content.
“My poor umbrella,” she said. “It was blown to pieces in my hand.”
“What made you do such an insane thing—come out at all?”
“Are you sorry I did?”
“Sorry! Supposing I had not taken a walk? Supposing the cold had killed you?”
“Would you have minded very much, Richard?”
This fond stichomythia! these amorous anglings for assurance and reassurance of love’s blisses! They are not for the wise to understand. I had not understood them myself an hour ago. Let me hide their memory away in that old old tabernacle of nature, where only the foolish and the selfsame smitten shall steal in to contemplate and adore.
Ira accounted to me for her rashness. The sight of Lady Skene’s restless anguish—for the child, though better from that dread attack of two nights ago, was still in a parlous state—had in the end proved too much for her, and she had hurried out to forget herself in exercise and fresh air. Then, wandering on blindly in the snow, she had suddenly awakened to the knowledge that she was lost, and very cold, and that the wind and rushing flakes seemed all at once to have become things of animate wickedness, shutting her round and in, and barring every exit with spears of ice.
“You must have been thinking very deeply, Ira, to have come so far without noticing. I wonder what about?”
“Yes, Richard. When—when we think a good deal of something, I suppose something is a good deal in our thoughts, isn’t it?”