So, far from mocking at the Workbox, I was only helplessly examining its tangled skeins. Nor was I criticizing Fanny. To help her—that was my one burning desire, to give all I had, take nothing. In a vague, and possibly priggish, fashion, I knew, too, that I wanted to help her against herself. Her letter (and perhaps the long waiting for it) had smoothed out my old excitements. In the midst of these musings memory suddenly alighted on the question in the letter which was to be shown to Mrs. Bowater: about the stargazing. There was no need for that now. But the point was, had not Fanny extorted a promise from me not to tell her mother of our midnight adventure? It seemed as though without a shred of warning the fair face had drawn close in my consciousness and was looking at me low and fixedly, like a snake in a picture. Why, it was like cheating at cards! Fascinated and repelled, I sank again into reverie.
“No, no, it’s cowardly, Fanny,” cried aloud a voice in the midst of this inward argument, as startling as if a stranger had addressed me. The morning was intensely still. Sunbeams out of the sky now silvered the clustered chimney shafts of Wanderslore. Where shadow lay, the frost gloomed wondrously blue on the dishevelled terraces; where sun, a thin smoke of vapour was ascending into the air. The plants and bushes around me were knobbed all over with wax-green buds. The enormous trees were faintly coloured in their twigs. A sun-beetle staggered, out among the pebbles at my feet. I glanced at my hands; they were coral pink with the cold. “I love you exceedingly—exceedingly,” I repeated, though this time I knew not to whom.
So saying, and, even as I said it, realizing that the exceedingly was not my own, and that I must be intelligent even if I was sentimental, I rose from my stone, and turned to go back. I thus faced the worn, small, stone house again. Instantly I was all attention. A curious feeling came over me, familiar, yet eluding remembrance. It meant that I must be vigilant. Cautiously I edged round to the other side of the angled wall, where lay the fallen tree. Hard, dark buds showed on its yet living fringes. Rather than clamber over its sodden bole, I skirted it until I could walk beneath a lank, upthrust bough. At every few steps I shrank in and glanced around me, then fixed my eyes—as I had learned to do by my stream-side or when stargazing—on a single object, in order to mark what was passing on the outskirts of my field of vision. Nothing. I was alone in the garden. A robin, with a light flutter of wing, perched to eye me. A string of rooks cawed across the sky. Wanderslore emptily stared. If, indeed, I was being watched, then my watcher was no less circumspect than I. Soon I was skirting the woods again, and had climbed the green knoll by which I had descended into the garden. I wheeled sharply, searching the whole course of my retreat. Nothing.
When I opened my door, Mrs. Bowater and Henry seemed to be awaiting me. Was it my fancy that both of them looked censorious? Absently she stood aside to let me pass to my room, then followed me in.
“Such a lovely morning, Mrs. Bowater,” I called pleasantly down from my bedroom, as I stood taking off my cloak in front of the glass, “and not a soul to be seen—though” (and my voice was better under command with a hairpin between my teeth); “I wouldn’t have minded if there had been. Not now.”
“Ah,” came the reply, “but you must be cautious, miss. Boys will be boys; and,” the sound tailed away, “men, men.” I heard the door open and close, and paused, with hands still lifted to my hair, prickling cold all over at this strange behaviour. What could I have been found out in now?
Then a voice sounded seemingly out of nowhere. “What I was going to say, miss, is—A letter’s come.”
With that I drew aside the curtain. The explanation was simple. Having let Henry out of my room, in which he was never at ease, Mrs. Bowater was still standing, like a figure in waxwork, in front of her chiffonier, her eyes fixed on the window. They then wheeled on me. “Mr. Bowater,” she said.
I was conscious of an inexpressible relief and of the profoundest interest. I glanced at the great portrait. “Mr. Bowater?” I repeated.
“Yes,” she replied. “Buenos Aires. He’s broken a leg; and so’s fixed there for the time being.”
“Oh, Mrs. Bowater,” I said, “I am sorry. And how terribly sudden.”
“Believe me, my young friend,” she replied musingly,
