Making a detour, they emerged into the park, and strolled back to a place where, seeing, they themselves could not be seen. Sidwell found a bench, and they sat down side by side. The girl offered no suggestion, no protest. Since that row of lights had appeared in the distance she had become passive. She knew beforehand all that was to take place; something that she had decided to accede to, the details of which were unimportant. An apathy which she did not attempt to explain held her. The music heard so near, the glimpses of shifting, faultlessly dressed figures, the loveliness of a perfect night--things that ordinarily would have been intensely exhilarating--now passed by her unnoticed. Her senses were temporarily in lethargy. If she had a conscious wish, it was that the inevitable would come, and be over with. From without this land of unreality she was suddenly conscious of a voice speaking to her. "Florence," it said, "Florence Baker, you know before I say a word the thing I wish to tell you, the question I wish to ask. You know, because more than once I've tried to speak, and at the last moment you have prevented. But you can't stop me to-night. We have run on understanding each other long enough; too long. I have never lied to you yet, Florence, and I am not going to begin now. I will not even analyze the feeling I have for you, or call it by name. I know this is an unheard-of-way to talk to a girl, especially one so impressionable as you; but I cannot help it. There is something about you, Florence, that keeps me from untruth, when probably under the same circumstances I would lie to any other woman in the world. I simply know that you impersonate a desire of my nature ungratified; that without you I have no wish to live." Strange and cold-blooded as this proposal would have seemed to a listener, Florence heard it without a sign. It did not even affect her with the shock of the unexpected. It was merely a part of that inevitable something she had anticipated, and had for months watched slowly taking form.