She smiled at him, satisfied. And how well she knew that her smiling face, caught by him dimly in the obscurity of the night, troubled him like an enchanting and enigmatic vision! After they had looked at each other, speechless, for a while, the strong influence of convention forced them again into unnecessary, irrelevant talk. 'What's this about you selling this place?' he inquired in a low, mild tone. 'Have you heard?' 'Yes,' he said, 'I did hear something.' 'Ah!' she murmured, wrinkling her forehead in a pretty make-believe of woe--the question of the sale had ceased to be acute: 'I just came out here to think about it.' 'But you aren't really going to----' 'No, of course not.' She had no desire to discuss the tedious affair, because she was infallibly certain of his entire sympathy. Explanations on her side, and assurances on his, were equally superfluous. 'But won't you come into the house?' She invited him as a sort of afterthought. 'Why?' he demanded bluntly. She hesitated before replying: 'It will look so queer, us staying here like this.' As soon as she had uttered the words she suspected that she had said something decisive and irretrievable. He put his hands into the pockets of his overcoat and walked several times to and fro a few paces. Then he stopped in front of her. 'I guess we are bound to look queer, you and I, some day. So it may as well be now,' he said. It was in this exchange of sentences that their mutual passion became at length articulate. A single discreet word spoken quickly, and she might even yet perhaps have withdrawn from the situation. But she did not speak; she could not speak; and soon she knew that her own silence had bound her. She yielded herself with poignant and magnificent joy to the profound drama which had been magically created by this apparently commonplace dialogue. The climax had been achieved, and she was conscious of being lifted into a sublime exultation, and of being cut off from all else in the world save him. She looked at him intently with a sadness that was the cloak of celestial rapture. 'How courageous you are!' her soft eyes said. 'I should never have dared. What a _man_!' It seemed to her that her heart would break under the strain of that ecstasy. She had not imagined the possibility of such bliss.