“Not now. But I shall not go on. What——” Her eyes strayed to the wood, and curiosity stirred in her. “What were you looking at so intently, Mr. Ovington, that you did not hear me?” He colored. “Oh, nothing!” “But it must have been something!” Her curiosity was strengthened. “Well, if you wish to know,” he confessed, shamefacedly, “I was looking at those snowdrops.” “Those snowdrops?” “Don’t you see how the sunlight touches them? What a little island of light they make among the brown leaves?” “How odd!” She stared at the snowdrops and then at him. “I thought that only painters and poets, Mr. Wordsworth and people like that, noticed those things. But perhaps you are a poet?” “Goodness, no!” he cried. “A poet? But I am fond of looking at things—out of doors, you know. A little way back”—he pointed up-stream, the way he had come—“I saw a rat sitting on a lily leaf, cleaning its whiskers in the sun—the prettiest thing you ever saw. And an old man working at Bache’s told me that he—but Lord, I beg your pardon! How can I talk of such things when I remember——?” He stopped, overcome by the recollection of that through which they had passed. She, for her part, was inclined to ask him to go on, but remembered that this, all this was very irregular. What would her father say? And Miss Peacock? Yet, if this was irregular, so was the adventure itself. She would never forget his face of horror, the appeal in his eyes, his poignant anxiety. No, it was impossible to act as if nothing had happened between them, impossible to be stiff and to talk at arm’s length about prunes and prisms with a person who had all but taken her life—and who was so very penitent. And then it was all so interesting, so out of the common, so like the things that happened in books, like that dreadful fall from the Cobb at Lyme in “Persuasion.” And he was not ordinary, not like other people. He looked at snowdrops! But she must not linger now. Later, when she was alone in her room, she could piece it together and make a whole of it, and think of it, and compass the full wonder of the adventure. But she must go now. She told him so, the primness in her tone reflecting her thoughts. “Will you kindly give me the basket?” “I am going to carry it,” he said. “You must not go alone. Indeed you must not, Miss Griffin. You may feel it more by and by. You may—go off suddenly.” “Oh,” she replied, smiling, “I shall not go off, as you call it, now.” “I will only come as far as the mill,” humbly. “Please let me do that.” She could not say no, it could hardly be expected of her; and she turned with him. “I shall never forgive myself,” he repeated. “Never! Never! I shall dream of the moment when I lost sight of you in the smoke and thought that I had killed you. It was horrible! Horrible! It will come back to me often.”