“Tuts!” she exclaimed impatiently, “why don’t you show a light? How can I see it without a light?”
“Dare I?” he asked, astonished.
“Dare! dare! Oh dear!” she repeated. “Am I to do the daring and break my neck perhaps?”
Out flashed the lantern from beneath his plaid and he held it up to the window. Nan leant over and all his hesitation fled. He had never seen her more alluring. Her hair had become somehow unfastened, and, without untidiness, there lay a lock across her brow; all her blood was in her face, her eyes might indeed have been the flames he had fancied, for to the appeal of the lantern they flashed back from great and rolling depths of luminousness. Her lips seemed to have gathered up in sleep the wealth of a day of kissing. A screen of tartan that she had placed about her shoulders had slipped aside in her movement at the window and showed her neck, ivory pale and pulsing.
“Come along, come along!” he cried in an eager whisper, and he put up his arms, lantern and all, as if she were to jump. Something in his first look made her pause.
“Do you really want to go?” he asked, and she was drawing her screen by instinct across her form. An observer, if there had been such, might well have been amused to see an elopement so conducted. There was still no sound in the night, except that the cock crew at intervals over in the cottars. The morning was heavy with dew; the scent of bog-myrtle drugged the air.
“Do I really want?” she repeated. “Mercy! what a question. It seems to me that yesterday would have been the best time to ask it. Are you rueing your bargain?” She looked at him with great dissatisfaction as he stood at the foot of the ladder, by no means a handsome cavalier, as he carried his plaid clumsily. He was made all the more eager by her coldness.
“Come, come!” he cried; “the house will be awake before you are ready, and I cannot be keeping this lantern lighted for fear some one sees it.”
“We are safe for an hour yet, if we cared to waste the time,” she said composedly, “and if you’re sure you want it——”
“Want you, Nan,” he corrected, “That’s a little more like it,” she said to herself, and she dropped the customary bundle at his feet He picked it up gingerly, as if it were a church relic; that it was a possession of hers, apparel apparently, made him feel a slight intoxication. No swithering now; he would carry out the adventure if it led to the end of the world! He hugged the bundle under his arm, as if it were a woman, and felt a fictional glow from the touch of it. “Well?” said she impatiently, for he was no longer looking at her, no longer, indeed, conceding her so little as the light of the lantern, which he had placed on the ground, so that its light was dissipated around, while none of it reached the top of the ladder.