"Matter? What should be the matter?"
I only smiled. It was so like Eric not to be pleased at hearing he had betrayed himself.
"I thought you looked as if—as if something had happened," I said. What I meant was, as if something were about to happen. Only one thing, I thought, could make Eric look like that; make him interrupt his precious morning; one thing, alone, could have grown so great overnight that the heart of man could not conceal it, or contain it, for another hour.
But, even if my hopes were not misleading me, I felt that Eric would not like my having guessed so much. To hide my eyes from him I bent down over my basket. I lifted out tufts of aromatic green, and set them firmly in the loosened soil. I pressed the earth down tight about their roots.
"What are you planting there?" he asked.
"Re-planting the wild thyme," I said. Something had killed it last year.
"Where do you find wild thyme?" he asked.
I told him how far I had to go for it. And when? Before breakfast! He looked astonished.
I did not like to explain that I had got into the habit of waking early to study. And, now that studying was no use, I spent the time in taking delicious walks in the early morning, before other people were awake. I confessed the walks.
"You ought not to have told me," he said.