The young man asked, “Will you trust me so far as to walk in the field?”
“Yes.”
“And will you trust me?”
“Yes.”
“What will your relations say?”
“I am answerable to none but myself. I am an orphan.”
Hand in hand they both left the dancing-hall. Barefoot heard whispering and tittering behind her, and kept her eyes fixed upon the ground. She was asking herself, “Have I not been too confident?”
Without, in the cornfield, where the first tender leaves were beginning to shoot from their protecting sheath, they looked silently at each other. No word was spoken. At length the young man seemed to ask, as to himself,—“If I might only know how it happens, that some people at the first glance can be so—so—confidential, as it were. How they can understand what the face alone at first reveals?”
“There,” said Amrie, “we have saved a soul; for you know that when two people have the same thought, at the same moment, a poor soul is saved. At your first word I had the same thought.”
“Indeed! And do you know why it is so?”