Wilkie Collins

The Law and the Lady Wilkie Collins

WE had been traveling for a little more than an hour when a change passed insensibly over usboth. Still sitting close together, with my hand in his, with my head on his shoulder, little by little we fellinsensibly into silence. Had we already exhausted the narrow yet eloquent vocabulary of love? Orhad we determined by unexpressed consent, after enjoying the luxury of passion that speaks, to trythe deeper and finer rapture of passion that thinks? I can hardly determine; I only know that a timecame when, under some strange influence, our lips were closed toward each other. We traveledalong, each of us absorbed in our own reverie. Was he thinking exclusively of me-as I was thinkingexclusively of him? Before the journey's end I had my doubts; at a little later time I knew for certainthat his thoughts, wandering far away from his young wife, were all turned inward on his ownunhappy self. For me the secret pleasure of filling my mind with him, while I felt him by my side, was a luxuryin itself. I pictured in my thoughts our first meeting in the neighborhood of my uncle's house. Our famous north-country trout stream wound its flashing and foaming way through a ravine inthe rocky moorland. It was a windy, shadowy evening. A heavily clouded sunset lay low and red inthe west. A solitary angler stood casting his fly at a turn in the stream where the backwater lay stilland deep under an overhanging bank. A girl (myself) standing on the bank, invisible to thefisherman beneath, waited eagerly to see the trout rise. The moment came; the fish took the fly. Sometimes on the little level strip of sand at the foot of the bank, sometimes (when the streamturned again) in the shallower water rushing over its rocky bed, the angler followed the capturedtrout, now letting the line run out and now winding it in again, in the difficult and delicate process of"playing" the fish. Along the bank I followed to watch the contest of skill and cunning between theman and the trout. I had lived long enough with my uncle Starkweather to catch some of hisenthusiasm for field sports, and to learn something, especially, of the angler's art. Still following thestranger, with my eyes intently fixed on every movement of his rod and line, and with not so muchas a chance fragment of my attention to spare for the rough path along which I was walking, Istepped by chance on the loose overhanging earth at the edge of the bank, and fell into the stream inan instant.