"I? No, certainly not! Why should I take cold?"
"In your thin evening dress!" said Roger, reproachfully. "With slippers on your feet,—there you stood in the snow, and would not go in when I told you. I have thought of nothing but pneumonia and consumption ever since. But—you look pretty well, I think!"
Hildegarde laughed in spite of herself.
"I—I thought you believed in being wet!" she said.
"For myself—of course! We are all polar bears, more or less; but it is different with you."
"Very different!" said Hildegarde. "I had snow-boots on, Captain Roger, all the time! Your anxiety has been thrown away, you see."
"So!" said Roger, with a look of intense relief. "I never thought of that! I—I didn't think—"
"You didn't think I had sense enough!" cried Hildegarde. "No more I had! They just happened to be on my feet, because I hadn't taken them off. I had been sitting and looking out of the window, ever since the Christmas Tree."
"So had I!" said Roger. "That was how we both happened to see. The moral is—"
He did not say what the moral was, but sat pulling his moustache, and looking at Hildegarde. Hildegarde felt herself blushing again; she tried to speak of some trivial thing, but the words died on her lips; the silence deepened every moment, and it seemed as if she and Roger were drowning in it, going deeper and deeper down, down,—