Ambrose sat and looked steadily at his float passing him slowly on the stream. He smiled queerly to himself. Desire has marvellous ways of presenting itself to the mind, he reflected. Then, aloud: “In all this it seems to be assumed that I should be prepared to remain a flawless and in no way troublesome glass in which you could feast your heart on the scenes of the past. I ought to warn you—the assumption, which you perhaps make, that I should be a cold, convenient husband, is unjustified.” She swayed on her feet, and her eyes stared at his unreadable face as if a spear from an unseen hand had smitten her side, and she was at grips with the reluctant secret of death. The delicious cavern of her mouth opened, but no words came. He gave her no help. He met her stare coldly, giving no shadow of a look that might carry the word of love. “Think that over,” he added, and returned to his fishing. 48 Late in the afternoon, three days’ journey from the Gorge, they put up for the night at a mountain-village inn. The inn was high and isolated, the innkeeper attentive (obedient to the sign of the Dragon). But he warned them that a band of revolutionary troops was thought to be approaching the neighbourhood, with fire and sword. “Are they, the festering blackheads?” Fulke’s revolutionary sympathies were a little alienated since his engagement to Ruby. “A lot of scrofulous thieves unworthy of the high name of revolutionary. By the giblets of St. Francis’s little dog——! I beg pardon, my darling.” “You were going to remark,” put in Quentin, “that these do not carry bricks for the New Jerusalem.” The Sages, the two girls, and Ambrose were gathered in the eating-room of the inn, talking, and watching the effect of sunset among the hills. Lychnis alone was silent, turning a matter over and over. Apparently she had recovered her firmness of heart, but not the transcendent experience. She had come to a point where she was indifferent to the past and future. The green tip of a budding flower of joy was fighting the winter snow and icy wind, the cold death in her mind. The Sages and Ruby were apprehensive, at the same time somewhat boastful. Ambrose found a great deal to amuse him in their conversation, for, strangely enough, each considered that he alone among all the others had probed the experience of the summer to the bottom. Blackwood, perhaps, was the most jaunty. He did not really quite know where he stood in regard to life, but he fully trusted that he should soon find out, and in the meantime took an extra lump of sugar in coffee. Ambrose surmises that the words of Wang Li had given sanction for the release of impulses too long pent up and not dissipated or re-directed, and in the first capital they came to there would be an expenditure of energy.