‘Now,’ said she, ‘won’t you turn back, sir? I don’t want to keep you, and I can go well enough by myself this way. It is very quiet.’
‘Yes, very quiet,’ replied he composedly. ‘I will walk round with you. My time is quite at your disposal.’
She hesitated for a moment, and he saw that she looked at him in a stealthy, side-long manner, of which he took no notice, openly. Happening to turn his head, he saw Gilbert just behind them. He wondered how he had got there, but felt a sense of relief in knowing that he was present, and obeying a sign of his brother’s hand, took no notice of him.
Midway over the bridge, Ada walked more slowly, raised her head, and began to look about her.
‘Why,’ she observed, ‘the river is in spate; that’s the rains up by Cauldron, I suppose?’
‘Yes,’ said Michael; and, indeed, there was a wild, if a joyous prospect around them. April green on the woods and grass, and April sunshine in the sky, and the river, which was, as she said, in spate, tearing along, many feet higher than usual, with brown, turbid waters, looking resistless in their swiftness and their strength.
‘Well,’ she next observed, in a muffled voice, ‘it’s far worse than I thought, and not better, as Miss Askam said it would be. It makes me sure that I’m right.’
‘Right in what, Ada?’
‘In what I thought about facing the people again.’
‘It is the first step that costs. In time you will mind it less. It is well that you tried it.’