"What are you thinking of?" he asked, all at once.
She found his eyes full upon her.
"Of what you had said," she responded. "And at this minute I'm speculating on whether anything—one's decisions, or acts, or sentiments—are ever quite conclusive or final. Or fatal, too, as you said. We might possibly except murder and suicide." She smiled as she mentioned this reservation.
Lee shifted his position with a trace of impatience.
"I'm not a pessimist," he exclaimed.
"No, you're too active to be. Pessimism is at bottom a kind of mental indolence, I'd say—an unpleasant kind."
"Some matters are not solved by action," said he. "That is, when they are out of one's hands and in another's."
Her attention was caught by those words, and she hung on them for a little. They distressed her; they caused her to understand the forced immobility of his face as he spoke, and wish that he would give way to his feeling. The phrase "out of one's hands and in another's" referred undoubtedly to Ruth Gardner. She did not trust herself to speak.
"What became of all those flowers that were in your garden last summer?" he asked, suddenly. "Do you dig up the roots, or cover them, or let them freeze? You have no idea how many times these cold days the recollection of that hour with you last summer when we walked among them recurs to me. It seems ages ago, however. That was one of the happy days, Louise."
A delicate tint of pink stole into her face. For to her also the day had been one of happiness, as clear-cut in her memory as a cameo. The thought that it and she had been dwelling in his mind produced in her breast an unaccountable agitation. The coral pink in her cheeks deepened to a flush; she lowered her eye-lashes and averted her look.