"Heels, too, I should say," said her companion; and they took their leave with the rest.
The next afternoon Arnold was sitting in his room with the windows open. It was an early spring day, when the outer air was breathing of summer. He was thinking of how the beautiful, cold Caroline had spoken to him the day before,—of that wild, appealing tone with which she had called him Arnold. Before, always, she had given him no more than the greeting of an acquaintance. Now, the tone in which she had spoken took a significance. As he was questioning it, recalling it, he suddenly heard his own name called most earnestly and appealingly. There was a softness, and an agony too, in its piercing tone, as if it came straight from the heart. "Arnold! come, come back!" He hurried to the window, wondering if he were under the influence of some dream. He looked down, and found himself a witness to a scene that he could not interrupt, because he could not help, and a sudden word might create danger. It passed very quickly, though it would take many words to describe it. A piazza led across the windows of the story below, to a projecting part of the building, the sloping roof of which it touched. At the other end of the sloping roof, where it met an alley-way that opened upon a street beyond, there was a little child leaning over to look at some soldiers that were passing through the street across the alley. He was supporting himself, by an iron wire that served as a lightning-rod. Already it was bending beneath his weight; and in his eagerness he was forgetting his slippery footing, and the dizzy height of thirty feet, over which he was hanging. He was a little three year-old fellow, too, and probably never knew anything about danger. His mother had always screamed as loudly when he fell from a footstool as when she had seen him leaning from a three-story window.
The voice came from a girl, who, at the moment Arnold came to the window, was crossing the iron palisade of the piazza. She was on the slippery, sloping leads as she repeated the cry, in a tone earnest and thrilling,—"Dear Arnold, come in, only come, and George shall take you to the soldiers."
The boy only gave another start of pleasure, that seemed to loosen still more his support, crying out, "The drummer! Cousin Laura, come, see the drummer!"
But Laura kept her way along the edge of the roof, reached the child, seized him, and walked back across the perilous slope with the struggling boy in her arms. Arnold the musician had noticed, even in her hurrying, dangerous passage towards the child, the rich sunny folds of her hair, golden like a German girl's. Now, as she returned, he saw the soft lines of her terror-moved face, and the deep blue of her wide-opened eyes. Her voice changed as she reached the piazza, and set the child down in safety.
"Oh, Arnold, darling, how could you, how could you frighten me so?"
The child began to cry, because it was reproved, because its pleasure was stopped, and because Cousin Laura, pale and white, held to the railing of the piazza for support. But the mamma came out, Laura was lifted in, the boy was scolded, the windows were shut, and there was the end.
Arnold sat by the window, thinking. The thrilling tones of the voice still rang in his ear, as though they were calling upon him, "Arnold, come, come back!"
"If any voice would speak to me in that tone!" he thought; "if such a voice would call upon my name with all that heart in its depths!"
And he compared it with the tone in which Caroline had appealed to him the day before. Sometimes her voice assumed the same earnestness, and he felt as if she were showing him in the words all her own heart, betraying love, warmth, ardor. Sometimes, in comparison with that cry, her tones seemed cold and metallic, a selfish appeal of danger, not a cry of love. He found himself examining her more nearly than he had ever done before.