"I want to tell you something," she said, raising her eyes to my face, and then averting them. "Follow me this way."
She strolled, as if accidentally, twenty or thirty paces along the bank; and in a minute I joined her. I found her gazing down the river in the direction from which we had come. "What is it?" I said anxiously. "You do not see anything, do you?" For there had been a hint of bad news in her voice.
She dropped the hand with which she had been shading her eyes and turned to me. "Master Francis, you will not think me very foolish?" she said. Then I perceived that her lip was quivering and that there were tears in her eyes. They were very beautiful eyes when, as now, they grew soft, and appeal took the place of challenge.
"What is it?" I replied, speaking cheerfully to reassure her. She had scarcely got over her terror of last night. She trembled as she stood.
"It is about Santon," she answered with a miserable little catch in her voice. "I am so afraid of going there! Master Lindstrom says it is a rough, long road, and when we are there we are not a bit farther from those wretches than at Wesel, and--and----"
"There, there!" I said. She was on the point of bursting into tears, and was clearly much overwrought. "You are making the worst of it. If it were not for Master Lindstrom I should be inclined to choose Wesel myself. But he ought to know best."
"But that is not all," she said, clasping her hands and looking up at me with her face grown full of solemn awe; "I have had a dream."
"Well, but dreams----" I objected.
"You do not believe in dreams?" she said, dropping her head sorrowfully.
"No, no; I do not say that," I admitted, naturally startled. "But what was your dream?"