She darted up, heedless of my cautions, and when finally I reached the top, quite out of breath, she was watching me with a malicious smile from her seat in the little observatory.
“Come up here and take a peep at the view. A fine soldier, to be out-distanced by a woman!”
“That’s hardly fair,” I said, laughing and relieved to pass from the dangerous seriousness of a moment ago. “Give me a few more weeks.”
Instantly she was contrite.
“How thoughtless of me. Forgive me!”
“Very little to forgive. By George, that’s fine.” The valley lay below us, blanketed with a sheen of snow that in great spaces lifted occasionally for a glimpse of green; black-blue shadows in the far hills, and faint, transparent reds in the bared branches against the sky; the whole tremulously still, a winter cameo cut in frozen silences.
“Do you want to go back?” she said at last.
“I shall answer you as I answered your father; honestly, no.”
“But then, why? Surely, after what you’ve been through, in your condition, and it would be so easy to arrange—”
“Exactly; but you, as my friend—would you want me to stay?”