But to-night she had other thoughts. They were not thoughts, they were a timorous, shying riot, that took hands; danced; and upon detection broke up into a scattered rabble. She knew only that they were lovely, and felt the soft muslin of their garments as they passed her. Not thoughts! no, they were more like wings, song, and breeze all chasing one another in her heart. Even the bronze presence of Silas and Gregory could not weigh against their feathery loveliness. She was bewildered, turning this way and that with hands outstretched, trying to capture one, to hold it, and examine it; but she could not, either because it eluded her, or because she feared to rub away its bloom and colour. She was like a girl, blindfolded, playing blindman’s buff in the midst of a ring of children. She sat quite idle, not consciously thinking, not even conscious that she was happy. For the moment she was completely happy; she had forgotten both Silas and Gregory. Calthorpe would not have found her wan; her cheeks were flushed and her lips parted, but so abstracted was she that she did not know it. She did not know that she was idle, although she was usually busy over some little industry. She had lost all sense save that of well-being and deliverance.
II
Silas recalled her as he shut his volume with a bang.
“What are you doing, Nan?”
“Oh....” She rebelled against this inquisition, irritated for once because she was startled. For all that she lived between a blind man and a deaf one, she had perpetually the sensation of being both watched and overheard. Her instinct leaped to a pang of guilt in being detected idle, and she resented the unspoken criticism. “Nothing, Silas; thinking.”
“What about?”
“I wondered what you were reading,” she lied.
He reopened the book, always eager to share out his own impressions. Trying page after page with his fingers, he came at last to the passage he sought. She saw the raised letters standing up in their strange shapes, casting strange little shadows.
“I’ll read to you, shall I?”
He began to read,—