And desirous as I was to know, how this was to happen, I durst not look round; because of darling Laura, who was terrified so that I had no resource, but to help her along, with both comfort and support.
"Oh, what does that mean?" she asked, with the saddest forebodings in her tearful eyes; and I answered,
"It must be the way, the grasshoppers are always going on, in this hot weather. It is the way they make love, you know, to one another."
"It sounds much heavier than a grasshopper," she whispered, as a yet louder stroke awoke the echoes; "and if that's the way they make love,—I am sure, it is not at all what I should like."
"Oh that I knew what way of doing it you do like!" I murmured even in that crisis, and she seemed not to hear me, except with her cheeks.
It struck me, that she should have been more anxious, for me to hurry back to the succour of the Earl. But, (either from not knowing what was toward, or from a readiness to keep me out of danger, or even perhaps some resignation to the code of justice) she took me quite up to the steps of the terrace, before she could at all dispense with me. And though I ran back at full speed, with three or four men after me, to the spot where I had left Lord Counterpagne; there was no evil-doer there, for us to apprehend, unless it was my lord himself. And we found him in such a very sad condition, that we were all afraid to lift him up.
CHAPTER XXX. PERFIDY.
Anything of that kind makes me sad; because I am in such a struggle to believe, what everybody now has settled long ago—and the younger he is, the more he feels it—that all our forefathers, in comparison with us, were low savages, fools, and brute beasts of the earth. And doubtless, to this perception of the nature, from which we ourselves descend—or rather, by some gift (more marvellous a thousandfold than mine) ascend, tower above their wretched loins, and soar into the seventy-seventh heaven, or at least as much as we have left of it undemolished—to this pure disdain of the brutes who begot us, are due our strong yearning towards, and reverend faith in, the great father of us all,—a little snail, without a head.