vellers are under, who,
having to ascend a steep escarpment of slippery grass, can only do so
by mutual assistance. Sally and the doctor got to the top, and settled
down to normal progress on a practicable gradient, and all the
exhilaration of the wide, wind-swept downland. But what had been to
the unconscious merpussy nothing but a mutual accommodation imposed by
a common lot--common subjection to the forces of gravitation and the
extinction of friction by the reaction of short grass on leather--had
been to her companion a phase of stimulus to the storm that was
devastating the region of his soul; a new and prolonged peal of
thunder swift on the heels of a blinding lightning-flash, and a deluge
to follow such as a real storm makes us run to shelter from. On Dr.
Conrad's side of the analogy, there was no shelter, and he didn't ask
for it. Had he asked for anything, it would have been for the power to
tell Sally what she had become to him, and a new language he did not
now know in which to tell it. And such a vocabulary!

But Dr. Conrad didn't know how simple the language was that he felt
the want of--least of all, that there was only one word in its
vocabulary. And when the two of them got to the top of their slippery
precipice, breathless, he was no nearer the disclosure he had made up
his mind to, and as good as promised Fenwick to make, than when they
were treading the beechmast and listening to the wood-doves in the
handy little forest they had left below. But oh, the little things
in this life that are the big ones all the while, and no one ever
suspects them!

A very little thing indeed was to play a big part, unacknowledged till
after, in the story of this walk. For it chanced that as they reached
the hill-top the diminution of the incline was so gradual that at
no exact point could the lease of Sally's hand to that of the doctor
be determined by either landlord or tenant. We do not mean that he
refused to let go, nor that Sally consciously said to herself that it
would be rude to snatch back the gloveless six-and-a-half that she had
entrusted to him, the very minute she didn't want his assistance. It
was a _nuance_ of action or demeanour far, far finer than that on
the part of either. But it was real all the same. And the facts of
the case were as clear to Sally's subconsciousness, unadmitted and
unconfessed, as though Dr. Conrad had found his voice then and there,
and said out boldly: "There is _no_ young lad