“Are you wearied?--you look as if you were.”
“Sit down--sit down on this stone--my child!”
I heard these sentences distinctly, one after the other, but could not answer. I felt my bonnet-strings untied, and the wind blowing on my face--then all grew light again, and I looked round.
“Do not be frightened; you will be well in a minute or two. I only wonder that you have kept up so bravely, and are so strong.”
This I heard too--in a cheerful kind voice--and soon after I became quite myself, but ready to cry with vexation, or something, I don't know what.
“You will not tell anybody?” I entreated.
“No, not anybody,” said he, smiling, “if turning faint was such a crime. Now, you can walk? Only not alone, just at present, if you please.”
I do not marvel at the almost unlimited power which, Augustus says, Doctor Urquhart has over his patients. A true physician--not only of bodies, but souls.
We walked on, I holding his arm. For a moment, I was half afraid of Lisabel's laugh, and the silly etiquette of our neighbourhood; which holds that if a lady and gentleman walk arm-in-arm they must be going to be married. Then _I_ forgot both, and only thought what a comfort it was in one's weakness to have an arm to lean on, and one that you knew, you felt, was not unwilling to have you resting there.
I have never said, but I will say it here, that I know Doctor Urquhart likes me--better than any other of my family; better, perhaps, than any friend he has, for he has not many. He is a man of great kindliness of nature, but few personal attachments. I have heard him say “that though he liked a great many people, only one or two were absolutely necessary to him.” Dallas might have been, had he lived. He told me, one day, there was a certain look in me which occasionally reminded him of Dallas. It is by these little things that I guess he likes me--at least, enough to make me feel, when with him, that rest and content that I never feel with those who do not care for me.
I made him laugh, and he made me laugh, several times, about trifles that, now I call them to mind, were not funny at all. Yet “it takes a wise man to make a fool, and none but a fool is always wise.”
With which sapient saying we consoled ourselves, standing at the edge of the larger pool, watching the other couple strolling along, doubtless very busy over the wild-duck affair.