“No, but you may do the cross.” She sat down beside him again, and he traced on her tender arm, with the fine point of the needle, a symbol and a badge.
“And you will not have the Hope?”
“That is in my heart.”
“In truth it is the safest place for it. Your arm might have to be amputated some day, but your heart, I know, will never die while you live.”
“Can the heart die?”
“Yes, it can be killed—it can die of disease, of cold, of fever, a thousand things can destroy it—just as the body is destroyed.”
“Don’t you keep your hope in your heart too?”
“Yes, when I have any. There’s no moon to-night. Let’s go. We shall have a storm before morning. See the waves! they look as if they had been saturated in the Blackness of Darkness, and were just escaped from it. And, do look up! what a fit pavilion are those clouds for the Angel of Wrath! oh, how I wish he would appear!”
“George! George!”
“Yes, Ella—for he would be sure to do away these cursed distinctions we know so much of! Then I should have no need for feeling as I do, when I shut your gate after you, and go on to the shed where the shoemaker’s widow lives with her son, whom people are so very kind, so exceeding kind, as to call a poet. Ella, neither you nor I will live to see it—but the old things shall pass away on this earth, and new powers reign here ere long. And then, in that blessed day when Justice shall rule, a girl like you may walk up this village street with a boy even like me, and take his arm, and speak with him as an equal, and none shall stare and think the condescension wonderful. As it is—walk alone—go on before me—though you are weary and cold, I am not fit to support or to shelter you.”