"I'm not afraid of anything else," she explained humbly. "Not of bears or anything in the deep woods. But caterpillars crawl so!"
"However, it didn't make any difference where you were, because while we were asleep it was just as it is while we are awake--there is a fine thread that goes from me to you. There might be processions of people between us, chariots and horses and marching armies, but they couldn't break the thread."
"Talk. Think. I think to you and you think back to me."
"But we must work. If we don't, you'll get tired of me." She spoke out of sad knowledge.
The reproach in his voice recalled her, and she was ashamed to find her belief less warm than his.
"Well," he conceded, "maybe we work. I go on grafting and sowing seeds and sending things to market, and you sit on a stone and sing."
"That wouldn't make any difference. When you sing, it wakens something in me, some discontent, some longing bigger than I am, and that's not pleasure. It is pain."
He waited a long time. Then he asked her,--
"The pain of the body is something to be afraid of. If we have it once, we cringe when we see it coming. But your singing--can I tell you what it wakens in me? No, for I don't know. Pain, the premonition of pain. Something I must escape."
"Yet I was to sit by and sing to you while you were at work."
"Yes, but that would be when we were quite content." It was the first wistful hint that things were lacking to him. He could not be contented; yet, against reason, his manner told a different, braver story.
"You said," she began, "if armies came between us, they could not break the little thread. Suppose I go away?"
"That wouldn't break it. Don't you suppose my thought can run to London or Rome? It isn't worth much if it can't."
"Suppose I"--she stopped, appalled at herself for the thought, but jealously anxious to be told.
"Suppose you marry the prince? That would be dreadful, because you don't love him. But it wouldn't break the thread. It would muffle it, I guess. We couldn't think back and forth on it. But it would be there."
Immediately it seemed to her that she had something even more precious than she had guessed, something not to be imperiled.
"I must not do anything to muffle it," she said. "Either with the prince--or any one."