“Perhaps, then, it occurred to you that I might have got into mischief,” she went on lightly. “You didn’t know that I come here nearly every night?”
“Why not?”
“And yet this is the first time you have followed me!” she said, regretfully. “Yes, I come here, night after night, and I look down into this pool, and I imagine myself lying in it with my face turned up to the moon, drowned and dead, and at an end of all my troubles, and you hearing of it, and being a little—a very little—sorry for me!”
“But you are surely not thinking of committing suicide, are you?” he asked her, quite calmly, “for, really, no one would have the slightest excuse for falling in off this miniature beach?”
She made a gesture of impatience—then she laughed, in tragic impotence.
“One can drown oneself in a teacup, if one has a mind. But I think I will go up the bank, now, and put myself out of the reach of temptation.”
“Do you want to go indoors? If not, let us walk a little way to the Junction, if you don’t mind? I want to see the Greta meet the Tees under this strong moonlight. It must be magnificent. It is a shame to stay in the house when the moon is out like this. Browning speaks of her ‘unhandsome thrift of silver.’ There’s plenty of her now, isn’t there? Glorious! It is a night of nights!”
Mrs. Elles agreed with him—but from a different point of view.
“Are you frightened?” he asked her, as they left the river bank and began gropingly to follow a track between two darknesses of tangled brushwood.
“Not with you!” she said, manfully; and he did not offer his arm.