"What are you thinking of?"
"Thinking of! —"
"Yes. You don't look as happy as I feel."
"I am," — she said.
"How do you know?"
What a colour spread over Elizabeth's face! But she laughed too, so perhaps his end was gained.
"I was thinking," she said, with the desperate need of saying something, — "a little while ago, when you were helping me through the woods, — how a very few minutes before, I had been so quite alone in the world."
"Don't forget there is one arm that never can fail you," he replied gravely. "Mine may."
Elizabeth looked at him rather timidly, and his face changed.
"There was no harm in that," he said, with so bright an expression as she had never before seen given to her. "What will you say, if I tell you that I myself at that same time was thinking over in my mind very much the same thing — with relation to myself, I mean."