"Let us sit down--shall we?" he said at length, and they turned to an empty bench under a tree. "What is she thinking?" he wondered, and then the dominant feeling of the moment possessed him wholly. His ambitions floated out of sight and were forgotten. He remembered nothing except the girl by his side, whose maddening bosom rose and fell under his very gaze. At that moment she belonged to no class; had no virtues, no faults. All the inessentials of her being were stripped away, and she was merely a woman, divine, desired, necessary, waiting to be captured. She sat passive, expectant, the incarnation of the Feminine. He took her hand and felt it tremble. At the contact a thrill ran about him, and for a second a delicious faintness robbed him of all strength. Then with inexplicable rapidity his mind went unerringly back to that train-journey to William's funeral. He saw the cottage in the fields, and the young mother, half robed and with sleep in her eyes, standing at the door. Exquisite vision! He heard himself speaking,-- "Laura...." The little hand gave a timorous encouragement. "Laura ... you are going to marry me." The intoxicating pressure of her lips on his was answer. Heedless of publicity, he crushed her against his breast, this palpitating creature with the serious face. Ah, she could love! It was done. The great irretrievable moment had gone to join a million other moments of no significance. He felt triumphant, fiercely triumphant. His frightful solitude was at an end. One woman was his. A woman ... his, his own! See! A tear quivered in her eye. CHAPTER XXXII Sunday was stiflingly hot. At Sloane Street the roof of every Putney omnibus was already laden with passengers, and Richard on his way to Carteret Street to make the acquaintance of Laura's married sister, Milly Powell, her husband and young child, was forced at last to be content with a seat inside. The public houses were just closing for the afternoon, and the footpaths full of holiday-makers, with here and there a girl or a middle-aged man carrying a Bible. No vehicles were abroad except the omnibuses and an occasional hired carriage which passed by with a nonchalant, lazy air. At the Redcliffe Arms there got in a little family party consisting of a stout, seemingly prosperous man, gruffly good-humoured, his wife, and a boy of about three years, whose puffy face was disfigured by large spectacles. "Sit here, Milly, out of the sun," the man said curtly.