As she remained silent, he went on quickly: "Do not misunderstand me. I only ask for the right to love you--I do not ask for any return." She was filled with an exquisite, tremulous joy. But that side of her nature which was restrained, and which had been so atrophied, was ignorant of the generosities of love, and shrank from quick surrender. So all she said, in a voice which sounded very cold to herself, was, "But that, Oliver, would surely not be fair--to you?" "Quite fair!" he exclaimed eagerly--"quite fair. In no case would I ever wish to obtain what was not freely vouchsafed." He muttered, in a voice so low as to be scarcely audible, some further words which moved her strangely, and vibrated to a chord which had never before been touched, save to jar and to offend. "To me aught else were sacrilege," were the words Oliver Tropenell said. By now Laura's eyes had become accustomed to the darkness. She could see her companion's tall, at once broad-shouldered and lean figure, standing at rights angles to herself, keeping its distance.... Taking a step forward, she put out her right hand a little blindly, and laid it on the sleeve of his coat. Laura had always been an inarticulate woman, but with that touch, that fleeting moment of contact between them, something of what she was feeling took flight from her heart to his---- "Laura?" He grasped her hands as he had grasped them three hours ago when they had first met in his mother's presence. And then again he breathed her name. But this time the touch of doubting, incredulous joy had passed into something ardent, exultant, possessive, and she was in his arms--her self-absorption, her fastidiousness, her lifelong shrinking from any strong emotion, swept away by a force which she had once only known sufficiently to abhor and to condemn, but which she now felt to be divine. And then Oliver Tropenell said a strange thing indeed. "To have secured this immortal moment, I would willingly die a shameful, ignoble death to-morrow," were the words he whispered, as he strained Laura to his heart, as his lips sought and found her lips.... At last they paced slowly on, and Laura found herself secretly exulting in the violence of Oliver's emotion, and in the broken, passionate terms of endearment with which he endowed her. That her response was that of a girl rather than that of a woman was to her lover an added ecstasy. It banished the hateful, earthy shade of Godfrey Pavely--that shade which had haunted Oliver Tropenell all that evening, even in his mother's house.