“The best possible occupation for a day like this. I’ve been doing the latter—dreaming,” he said.
“You? Why, you have been hard at work all day,” said she. “I’ve been watching you walking about in the rain with a spade, and pitying you for being so uncomfortable, while we were all sitting indoors, dry and warm.”
“Pitying me?”
“To any extent,” she answered, looking up at him with a bright smile.
He bent over her. “Yes, I was dreaming—of such a moment as this.”
She did not answer. Her eyes were fixed on the gloom without and the soft falling rain. Oh, the continuous drip, drip of that ceaseless rain throughout this livelong day, turning the daylight into dusk, and beating time in her heart to the echoes of the past! And throughout it all was a vague, indefinable longing for this man’s presence. The enforced imprisonment in the house had been doubly irksome without him, and at last she had been constrained to own it to herself. Once she had seen him coming towards the door, and all unconsciously had made ready such a bright smile of welcome; but he had turned back, and the smile had faded, and a chill, sickly feeling around her heart had taken its place. What right had she to feel thus, she thought? In a few weeks they would part as friends, acquaintances, nothing more, and then—well, at any rate he knew the worst. But now as he found her in the darkening twilight, her heart gave a bound, and her voice assumed a dangerous tenderness as she replied to him.
“The rain has been very cruel,” he went on. “I couldn’t catch so much as one stray glimpse throughout the whole afternoon. If you are blockaded indoors, you might look out of the window now and then.”
“Why, I’ve done nothing else. And you, did you get very wet?” And there is a little inflection as of anxiety in her voice as she raises her eyes to his.
“Don’t let’s talk about me, but about a far more interesting subject—yourself. Haven’t you been frightfully bored to-day?”
“Well, I have rather—at least, I mean, I oughtn’t to say that, but one gets rather low sometimes, you know, even without much cause, and I’ve been so to-day,” she answered, her tone relapsing into one of dejection, and he, standing there beside her, began to feel deliriously happy, though well knowing that it was for the moment. But the gloaming was about them, and they were alone together. What more could he—could they—want?