She really did have a very little headache; though this was the least of her troubles.
There sounded a whistle outside. In the midst of her wretchedness, Louise lifted her head and listened. Low and sustained, it had saluted her ear when dawn's pink flush was in the sky; but now it seemed far more eager; it seemed to glint through the sunshine.
Springing to her window, Louise crouched there. The historical novel lay on the sill, where she had left it. Her fingers closed tensely about it, although she did not at first realize what it was she was clutching. Leslie was outside. She could see him coming on through the forest, and caught her breath in a little hysterical gasp of joy. Leslie! She couldn't let him go! She loved him! She had never, she felt, loved anybody as she loved Leslie. Oh, the injustice of it! That he must be denied her, though it was he she loved the best! But there must be a way. Somehow, somehow she must contrive.... She must contrive, whatever it might cost, to keep him.... But she faltered. Wasn't it too late?
His hands were in his pockets; his face was richly animated; his eyes were full of light. Leslie was almost handsome—ah, strangely more beautiful now than when she had wanted to be his friend. His brightness dazzled her; and she looked out at him through her perplexed tears.
He had held her for a moment in his arms as they stood, so deeply enthralled, on that dappled forest road. Would he ever hold her in his arms again?
"Leslie!" she murmured.
He halted, looking quickly about.
"I'm here," she continued, in the same unhappy tone, "—up here!" They were the very words Lynndal had used when he stood above her on the deck of the steamer.
And it was plain, too painfully plain, Leslie had not been searching her window. At first he appeared a little embarrassed. An indefinite numbness closed about her heart. It seemed, all at once, as though retrospect embodied no mutual past for these two. Intimate strangers! For all at once Leslie seemed as essentially unknown and aloof from her destiny as Lynndal had seemed during that first curious, bewildering moment when his steamer was coming in. Leslie—merely a lad passing by outside, under her window. And she blushed at the thought of having dared to speak to him....
"Do you know where Hilda is?" he enquired, trying to throw a great deal of carelessness into both tone and posture.