In the silence of the night, with nerves high-strung and with brain excited he tried in those most earnest hours of his life, when for good or ill he was to organise his intellectual forces, to arrange matters so that at the earliest time he might with certainty learn his fate. He had an idea that in such a meeting as was before him he must not be over-precipitated. And yet he must not check impulsiveness as long as its trend was in the right direction. He knew that a woman’s heart is oftener won by assault than by siege. For himself he had plenty of patience as well as a sufficiency of spirit; his task at present therefore was one of generalship alone: the laying out of the battle plans, the disposition of his forces. As he thought, and as his ideas and his intentions came into order, he began to understand better the purpose of those two preparations of his which were already complete: the overhauling of his automobile, and the supplying it with female wraps. He intended by some means or other, dependent on developing opportunity, to bring her for a ride in the motor. There, all alone, he would be able to learn, perhaps at first from her bearing and then from her own lips, how she regarded him. Athlyne was a young man, a very young man in his real knowledge of the sex. There are hundreds, thousands, of half-pulseless boys, flabby of flesh and pallid with enervating dissipation, who would have smiled cynically--they have not left in them grit enough for laughter--at his doubting.