Her heart was beating in so wild an ecstasy of thanksgiving for an unspeakable horror escaped, his heart was beating in so passionate and proud and humble a recognition of what her touch on his arm confessed, that neither of them heard the foreman's words or guessed at the meaning of what he was calmly and coldly telling them. Only afterward the memory of his words came back, bringing with it understanding. They were led across a flat wilderness of splintered slate toward the tall cliff from which now and then came the noise like thunder which blasting-powder makes when it does its work. They two, hardly conscious of anything but that they held each other—the one who had been in danger, safe; the other passionately grateful for that other's safety; and the endangered one, passionately sensible of her passionate gratitude, heard not a word that the foreman spoke, though he spoke all the time.
"You are here; I hold you safe; but, oh, if I had lost you!" her heart was singing to a breathless, syncopated measure.
"You cared; you cared as much as this. If I had fallen over that perilous edge. . . . Oh, but you care, you care! It is as much as this to you," his heart sang, keeping time to hers.
It was a trance of mutual meeting emotion such as they had not yet known. In that one moment, when he walked the narrow edge of that precipice and when she had seen the precipice for the horror it was, she learned more than in all her life before. And he, in the moments that followed, knew, beyond possibility of mistake or misunderstanding, what it was that she had learned. If only they could have walked straight out of that quarry into the world of stream and mountain, the world where you are only two—but the foreman was there, walking and talking, and at last stopping and saying:
"This is where it happened."
And they came out of their dream to find themselves close to the slate cliff at whose base lay great blocks of slate newly fallen, and to see the flat slate flakes at their feet, brown and wet.
"Where what happened?" Edward asked, vaguely.
"What I've been telling you about," said the foreman, aggrieved. "Where one of our workmen was killed just now, blasting; that's his blood what you're standing in," said he.
Then, indeed, she clung to his arm. "Take me away," she whispered. "Oh, why does everything turn horrible like this? It's like a horrible dream. Let's get away. Give him something and let's get away."
"It's not my fault," said the foreman, in very injured tones. "She said she'd like to see it. I wondered, at the time, but there's no accounting for females, is there?"