He was silent, and they remained motionless, staring at each other like two stone pillars bearing the solemn weight of the unknown future. Then he possessed himself of one of her hands, and it was a new shock to him to feel how ice-cold her fingers had grown.

“Don’t act as if we’re strangers, Gerda!” he pleaded. “I do understand you⁠—much more than you think I do. And I’ll take care of you forever! It isn’t as if time mattered one bit. I feel as if I’d known you all my life. I feel as if everything here”⁠—and he glanced round at those strangely important white blossoms⁠—“were an old story already. It’s funny, Gerda, isn’t it, how natural and yet how weird it is, that we should have met at all? Only a week ago I was in London, with no remotest idea that you were in the world⁠—or this gate, or this blackthorn-hedge, or that shed over there!”

Her cold fingers did respond a little to his pressure now, and her eyes fell and searched the ground at her feet. Without a sigh, without a breath, she pondered, floating upon some inner sea of feeling, of which no one, not even herself, would ever know the depths.