"Good-night, Douglas!" she said. "Stephen is a name too common for you--I shall call you Douglas. Remember, you must love me a little--but not too much."
I stood dull and stupid, in a maze of whirling thought. My great lady had suddenly grown human, but human of a kind that I had had no conception of. Only this morning I had been opening the stores of very chill wisdom to my pupil, Henry Fenwick of Allerton. Yet here, long ere night was at its zenith, was I, standing amazed, trying under the stars to remember exactly what a woman had said, and how she looked when she said it.
"To love her a little--yet not to love her too much."
That was the difficult task she had set me. How to perform I knew not.
"Do you think that we need go on to-morrow morning?" he said. "Do you not think we are in a very good quarter of the world, and that we might do worse than stop a while?"
"If you wish it, I have no objections," I said, with due caution.
"Thank you!" he said, and ran off to give some further directions about his guns.
It need not be wondered at that during the night I slept little. It seemed such a strange thing which had happened to me. That a great lady should lean upon my arm--a lady of whom before that day I had never heard--seemed impossible to my slow-moving Scots intelligence.
I sat most of the night by my window, from which I looked down the valley. The moonlight was filling it. The stars tingled keen and frosty above. Lucent haze of colourless pearl-grey filled the chasm. On the horizon there was a flush of rose, in the midst of which hung a snowy peak like a wave arrested when it curves to break, and on the upmost surge of white winked a star.
I opened the casement and flung it back. The cool, icy air of night took hold on me. I listened. There came from below the far sound of falling waters. Nearer at hand a goat bleated keenly. A dull, muffled sound, vast and mysterious, rose slumberously. I remembered that I was near to the great Alps. Without doubt it was the rumble of an avalanche.
But more than all these things,--under this roof, closed within the white curtains, was the woman who with her well-deep, serene eyes had looked into my life.
"To-morrow and to-morrow and to-morrow!" I said to myself, seeing the possibilities waver and thicken before me. So I went to my bed, leaving the window open, and after a time slept.