eorge has it now locked
up in a box. Don't you tell him that I told you."

Then they stopped and leaned for a while over the parapet of the
bridge. "Come here, George," said Kate; and she made room for him
between herself and Alice. "Wouldn't you like to be swimming down
there as those boys were doing when we went out into the balcony? The
water looks so enticing."

"I can't say I should;--unless it might be a pleasant way of swimming
into the next world."

"I should so like to feel myself going with the stream," said Kate;
"particularly by this light. I can't fancy in the least that I should
be drowned."

"I can't fancy anything else," said Alice.

"It would be so pleasant to feel the water gliding along one's limbs,
and to be carried away headlong,--knowing that you were on the direct
road to Rotterdam."

"And so arrive there without your clothes," said George.

"They would be brought after in a boat. Didn't you see that those
boys had a boat with them? But if I lived here, I'd never do it
except by moonlight. The water looks so clear and bright now, and the
rushing sound of it is so soft! The sea at Yarmouth won't be anything
like that I suppose."

Neither of them any longer answered her, and yet she went on talking
about the river, and their aunt, and her prospects at Yarmouth.
Neither of them answered her, and yet it seemed that they had not a
word to say to each other. But still they stood there looking down
upon the river, and every now and then Kate's voice was to be heard,
preventing the feeling which might otherwise have arisen that their
hearts were too full for speech.

At last Alice seemed to shiver. There was a slight trembling in her
arms, which George felt rather than saw. "You are cold," he said.

"No indeed."

"If you are let us go in. I thought you shivered with the night air."

"It wasn't that. I was thinking of something. Don't you ever think of
things that make you shiver?"

"Indeed I do, very often;--so often that I have to do my shiverings
inwardly. Otherwise people would think I had the palsy."

"I don't mean things of moment," said Alice. "Little bits of things
make me do it;--perhaps a word that I said and ought not to have said
ten years ago;--the most ordinary little mistakes, even my own past
thoughts to myself about the merest trifles. They are always making
me shiver."

"It's not because you have committed any murder then."

"No; but it's my conscience all the same,