She seemed to dismiss the question, and stood hand-in-hand with him in a state of glowing gravity. She wouldn't see him again for four-and-twenty hours. Then a thought came into her head--a point of great practical moment. "Oh!" she said, "of course, you won't tell father you've seen me." She met his eye. "Really you mustn't," she said. "You see--he'll make a row with mother for not having watched me better. I don't know what he isn't likely to do. It isn't myself----This is a confidential communication--all this. No one in this world knows I am meeting you. If you _must_ go to him, go to him." "For myself?" She nodded, with her open eyes on his--eyes that looked now very blue and very grave, and her lips a little apart. She surprised him a little, but even this sudden weakness seemed adorable. "All right," he said. "You don't think that I'm shirking----?" she asked, a little too eagerly. "You know your father best," he answered. "I'll tell you all he says and all the terror of him here to-morrow afternoon." § 7 In the stillness of the night Trafford found himself thinking over Marjorie; it was a new form of mental exercise, which was destined to play a large part in his existence for many subsequent years. There had come a shadow on his confidence in her. She was a glorious person; she had a kind of fire behind her and in her--shining through her, like the lights in a fire-opal, but----He wished she had not made him promise to conceal their meeting and their close co-operation from her father. Why did she do that? It would spoil his case with her father, and it could forward things for them in no conceivable way. And from that, in some manner too subtle to trace, he found his mind wandering to another problem, which was destined to reappear with a slowly dwindling importance very often in this procedure of thinking over Marjorie in the small hours. It was the riddle--it never came to him in the daytime, but only in those intercalary and detachedly critical periods of thought--why exactly had she engaged herself to Magnet? Why had she? He couldn't imagine himself, in Marjorie's position, doing anything of the sort. Marjorie had ways of her own; she was different.... Well, anyhow, she was splendid and loving and full of courage.... He had got no further than this when at last he fell asleep. § 8