He stopped. His breath was coming very quickly, and the arms that held her under the big coat tightened their grip. "Forgive me," he stammered.
"Forgive you?" she whispered, faintly interrogative.
When our lives come to be written in their true proportion, it will be found that in some cases a year has passed like a watch in the night, while some nights have lasted for years. This is why the realistic novelists, who take pages to describe how a girl took a taper out of the sideboard drawer and lit the gas, are so pitifully mistaken. When a good cook takes a cabbage to cook for the pot, her first action is to strip and throw away the outer leaves, as of no value. The realist seems to deal only with these outer leaves. He does not hold that any cabbage is ever cooked, or, if it is, then it was not worth the cooking. Life, in his estimation, consists in the perpetual stripping of outer leaves.
The night in the mile-castle marked an extraordinary epoch to Olwen Innes. When she looked back to it she felt that had not her senses been so bemused there were certain deductions she must have drawn, certain conclusions at which she must have arrived.
As a matter of fact, all these things escaped her at the time, she being in no state to reason. Yet the impressions left by what then happened to her were so deep that afterwards she was able to think out the whole thing justly.
There were periods during that long waiting when her temperature rose, and she chattered a little deliriously. There were moments when she grew cold and sick, and shivering fits assailed her. Again there were merciful interludes, during which she slumbered heavily. In all these phases Ninian Guyse was close at hand to lay her down, to ease her posture, to chafe her cold hands, to hold her close in his efforts to keep life in her.
She did not know how, in course of those dreadful hours, he parted by degrees with quite half his clothing to reinforce her flickering vitality. She had longish periods of something that was half sleep, half stupor, and during these he rested. He dare not risk allowing their carefully cultivated warmth to escape by opening the door until the last moment, when they must make their final dash.