‘And to think we shall have to leave all this presently and enter into the fret and care of settling down!’ he said, with a half-laugh. ‘I interrupted you, dear, to-night when you were talking of that. I suppose it was I that diverted your thoughts. Since it is not to be your Towers, where is it to be?’ ‘Not my Towers,’ she said, with a little half-reproachful look at him and a sudden clasping together of her lightly interlaced fingers. ‘Well, let us say Tom’s Towers; but in present circumstances it is very much the same.’ Once more a little shiver ran over her, though there was no chill at all in the soft air that came in from the lake and the moonlight. But her voice was a little uncertain with it, as if her teeth had chattered. ‘Don’t talk of it,’ she said; ‘I want no Towers. I want not a _place_ at all, or any quarters, but a house, a pretty house, just big enough for us and them, somewhere, wherever you would like, Edward.’ ‘I shall like what you like,’ he said. ‘But that is not what I wish at all; I want you to tell me what will please _you_. You would like to be within reach of the great libraries, within reach of what is going on. No one can write what is to live without being within reach----’ He shook his head. ‘You are too partial in your estimate of what I am likely to do; so long as I am within reach of you--and thank God nothing can put me out of that!--I don’t know that I care for anything more.’ ‘That is what I should say, Edward,’ she said, with some vehemence, ‘not you. Do you think I am such a silly woman as to wish you to be entirely occupied with me? No, no; that is the woman’s part.’ ‘Well,’ he said, with his usual soft laugh, ‘mine is the feminine _rôle_, you know, to a great extent. Fortunately, my disposition quite chimes in with it.’ ‘What do you mean by the feminine _rôle_?’ ‘My love, I don’t mean anything. I mean that life was too many for me when you and I were parted. I was the divided half, don’t you know, “of such a friendship as had mastered time.” Being sundered from my mate, time mastered me: I took to floating, as you don’t like to do, even on the lake.’ ‘Edward,’ she cried, ‘if anything could make it more dreadful to me to think of that time, it would be hearing you speak so.’ ‘Don’t,’ he said, ‘there is no occasion; after all, neither time nor anything else masters one if it is not in one’s nature. You think too well of me, Carry. Some people are made to float.’ ‘And what was I then?’ she said. ‘I was swept away. I could not resist the force against me. It was worse for me, oh! far worse, Edward, than for you. I was caught by the torrent: there was no floating in my case. Perhaps you will say I was made to be carried away.’