CHAPTER XX.
"Time tries the troth in everything."
—Thomas Tusser.
The voice comes to her distinctly across the sward, browned by Winter's frown, and over the evergreens that sway and rustle behind her back.
"Shall I answer?" says Dulce to herself, half uncertainly; and then she hesitates, and then belies the old adage because she is not lost, but decides on maintaining a discreet silence. "If he comes," she tells herself, "he will only talk, talk, talk! and, at his best, he is tiresome; and then he worries so that really life becomes a burden with him near. And the day, though cold, is bright and frosty and delicious, and all it should be at Christmas time, and when one is wrapped in furs one doesn't feel the cold," and she really means to enjoy herself with her book, and now—
"Dulce!" comes the voice again, only nearer this time, and even more pathetic in its anxiety, and Dulce moves uneasily. Perhaps, after all, she ought to answer. Has she not promised many things. Shall she answer or not, or—
This time her hesitation avails her nothing; a step can be heard dangerously close, and then a figure comes up to her very back, and peers through the thick hedge of evergreens, and finally Stephen makes his way through them and stands before her.
He is flushed and half angry. He is uncertain how to translate the extreme unconcern with which she hails him. Did she hear him call, or did she not? That is the question. And Stephen very properly feels that more than the fate of a nation depends upon the solution of this mystery.
"Oh! here you are at last," he says, in a distinctly aggrieved tone. "I have been calling you for the last hour. Didn't you hear me?"
When one has been straining one's lungs in a vain endeavor to be heard by a beloved object, one naturally magnifies five minutes into an hour.