"Here you are! I was growing so frightened about you! What can have made you so late?"
"It was so—so—pleasant! The thrushes were singing so!" reply I, thus happily inaugurating my career of invention.
"But, my dear child, the thrushes went to bed two hours ago!"
"Yes," I answer, at once entirely nonplussed, "so they did!"
"Where have you been?" she asks, in a tone of ever-increasing surprise. "Did you go farther than you intended?"
"I went—to see—the old Busseys," reply I, slowly; inwardly pondering, with a stupid surprise, as to whether it can possibly have been no longer ago than this very afternoon, that the old man mistook me for the dead Belinda—and that I held the old wife's soapy hand in farewell in mine; "the—old—Busseys!" I repeat, "and it took—me a long—long time to get home!"
I shiver as I speak.
"You are cold!" she says, anxiously. "I hope you have not had a chill—" (taking my hands in her own slight ones)—"yes—starved!—poor dear hands; let me rub them!" (beginning delicately to chafe them).
Something in the tender solicitude of her voice, in the touch of her gentle hands, gives me an agony of pain and remorse. I snatch away my hands.
"No! no!" I cry, brusquely, "they do very well!"