"Indeed, I do not laugh at you! That dream was enough to upset any one."
He shook his head, conveying by the shaking of his head and the expression of his face the idea that, great as might be her power of realising his sufferings, they were infinitely greater than she could imagine.
Then he shook the whole of his body to rouse himself out of his lethargy, and establish himself in her mind as a man of action. He begged of her to get him a piece of string, and when she had found him some he asked her to favour him by accompanying him to the ice-house, and aid him in taking measurements for the doors to block up the yawning death traps, as he called the doorways.
He could not reach the lintel of the doors without something on which to stand. He asked her to hold the string for him till he came back, and went to the kitchen and fetched a chair. He mounted on the chair, and asked her to draw the string taut to the ground, and knot the point at which the string touched the raised threshold.
"There were double doors here once, but single doors will do now," he said.
When he had completed his measurement he said:
"I shall go from this to the carpenter and leave orders for the doors. I shall come back in a week to see them put up."
For a few minutes he seemed to fall into a profound reverie, and then, waking up all at once, looked at her with eyes full of terror, and, pointing into the flooded ice-house said hoarsely:
"Hetty, it was in there I saw you drowning! Do you know what that sight meant to me, girl?" He bent close to her ear and answered his own question in a whisper:
"Madness!"