“I never have done that!” I snapped. “You believe me that last night was an accident.” “Yes,” he argued, “but you must confess that other things look rather mysterious.” “Mysterious? Need _you_ talk about things being mysterious,” I argued back, “when the whole of what you wanted me for has been such a mystery to me? You’ve never given me a hint of the reason!” “I haven’t been able to! You were to have known later! But about this other——” He broke off as a mild-looking old man plumped himself down on the green seat next his, and began to scatter crumbs out of a paper-bag to the sooty sparrows twittering on the path. “I can’t tell you, here——” “I am rather deaf,” said the bird-feeder, mildly looking up, “and quite elderly. Don’t mind me.” Still Waters looked as if he could have choked him with his paper-bag. “We’ll walk about a bit, if you don’t mind,” he said curtly to me. And it seems to me now that for hours and hours we two walked Battersea Park, talking, talking, still repeating ourselves over “_that wire_” and “_nothing to do with you_” and “_yes, but I’d at least a right to object to your making me look_——” ... Round the lake we went, up and down the path of the river front, on the broad bald grass patches, passing communities of little motherly girls with perambulators and picnic-bags in the shadow of the elms, skirting little boys’ cricket-matches conducted with crooked bats, shrill yells—it was all noise and glare and dust that morning, and I couldn’t really say why we should be walking up and down in it like this, endlessly discussing what had no point, now.... Hadn’t we come, long ago, to the end? At last he did raise a fresh point. “Anyhow,” he blurted out, “I stand in your way no longer.” This roused me beyond all the rest. “D’you mean,” I cried, exasperated, “in the way of my possibly marrying Mr. Vandeleur?” “Exactly!” Was I to stand this? Was I to let him go away imagining _that_ was the sort of girl I was? Was I to allow him, later on, to think of his official ex-_fiancée_ (if he ever thought of her again) as being quite contented to accept a dangling _dilettante_ with those tastes and that tie, an indoor object who pottered amiably about Art-galleries and girls’ studios, between the Tiny Theatre and the Cave of the Cub, a pampered amateur who couldn’t earn his living to save his life?... was a real man to think of me, married to That? No—fear!