"My dear man," said Urquhart, "just you wait. I'll surprise you in a quarter of an hour's time." He spoke in his old way, as hectoring whom he tolerated. James noticed it, and was amused. He hadn't yet had time to be angry with this rascal; and now he began to doubt whether he should. After all, he had gained so very much more than he had lost. Honour? Oh, that be jiggered. Something too much of his own honour. Why, it was through Urquhart's attack upon Lucy that he had found out what Lucy was. Urquhart, at this time, was marching rather in front of him: James looked him over. A hardy, impudent rogue, no doubt--with that square, small head on him, that jutting chin--and his pair of blue eyes which would look through any woman born and burn her heart to water. Yes, and so he had had Lucy's heart--as water to be poured over his feet. By Heaven, when he thought of it, he, James Adolphus, had been the greater rogue: to play the Grand Turk; to hoard that lovely, quivering creature in his still seraglio; to turn the key, and leave her there! And Jimmy Urquhart got in by the window. Of course he did. He was not an imaginative man by nature; but he was now a lover and had need to enhance his mistress. How better do that than by calling himself a d----d fool (the greatest blame he knew)? It follows that if he had been a fool, Urquhart had not! Impudent dog, if you like, but not a fool. Now, for the life of him, James could not despise a man who was not a fool. Nor could he hate one whom he had bested. He did not hate Urquhart; he wasn't angry with him; he couldn't despise him. On the contrary, he was sorry for him. But now the miracle happened, and one could think of nothing else. As they tramped through the cold mist, over snow that was still crisp and short with frost, the light gained by degrees. The flying fog became blue, then radiant: quite suddenly they burst into the sun. The dazzling field stretched on all sides so far as the eye could see. Snow and cloud, one could not distinguish them; and above them the arch of hyaline, a blue interwoven with light, which throbbed to the point of utterance, and drowned itself in the photo-sphere. The light seemed to make the sun, to climb towards the zenith, to mass and then to burst in flame. All three men took it in, each in his fashion. Lingen was greatly moved; Urquhart became jocular. "Well," he said to Macartney, "what do you make of that? That's worth coming up for. That ought to extenuate a good deal." James was quick to notice the phrase. "Oh," he said, "you can show me things. I'm very much obliged to you. This is a wonder of the world." "Now what the deuce does he mean by that?" Urquhart thought to himself. Had Lucy told him anything? He didn't believe it. Impossible. Women don't tell.