“May I help you over the stile? Oh, your basket!”
She saw that it lay some yards away, blackened by powder, one corner shot away; so narrow had been the escape! He had a feeling of sickness as he took it up. “You must not go on alone,” he said. “You might faint.”
“Not now. But I shall not go on. What——” Her eyes strayed to the wood, and curiosity stirred in her. “What were you looking at so intently, Mr. Ovington, that you did not hear me?”
He colored. “Oh, nothing!”
“But it must have been something!” Her curiosity was strengthened.
“Well, if you wish to know,” he confessed, shamefacedly, “I was looking at those snowdrops.”
“Those snowdrops?”
“Don’t you see how the sunlight touches them? What a little island of light they make among the brown leaves?”
“How odd!” She stared at the snowdrops and then at him. “I thought that only painters and poets, Mr. Wordsworth and people like that, noticed those things. But perhaps you are a poet?”
“Goodness, no!” he cried. “A poet? But I am fond of looking at things—out of doors, you know. A little way back”—he pointed up-stream, the way he had come—“I saw a rat sitting on a lily leaf, cleaning its whiskers in the sun—the prettiest thing you ever saw. And an old man working at Bache’s told me that he—but Lord, I beg your pardon! How can I talk of such things when I remember——?”