She was erect once more and she looked at him steadily, although her breath was short and her cheeks blazing. "What do you mean by that?" His eyes no longer looked like blue steel. They were flashing, and a curious wave of mobility passed over his face. "I mean that you love me now. I think you always loved me--when we spent so many hours together in perfect companionship--when you found so much in me that responded to so many of your own needs. But for the time being this was only a surface impression. It was unable to strike down to--to your soul, because between your outer and inner vision was the delusion. You had cherished some sort of ideal since boyhood, and when for the first time in your busy life you met a woman who seemed to materialise it--you never once had a half-hour's conversation with her!--you automatically rose to the opportunity to discharge a youthful obligation. Isn't that true?" He would not answer, and she continued: "You passed me over because you had to be rid of the delusion first, bag and baggage. There is only one way to get rid of an old delusion like that, and unconsciously you took it! The pity of it is, in our case, that you compromised yourself so promptly, instead of waiting--well, for ten weeks!" "I had already asked Mrs. Balfame to get a divorce and marry me." "Oh! That night you walked home with her from Dr. Anna's cottage?" "You saw us? Yes, that was the time." "The first time you had ever talked alone with her? I know that you dined there often, but didn't Dave usually do the talking?" "Yes." "And Mrs. Balfame smiled like St. Cecilia and attended to your wants." "Oh!" "It was like you to think you couldn't go back on even an Elsinore Avenue flirtation. But once more--it is a terrible pity that you did not delay your formal offer for ten weeks. Then you would have buried the last and the supreme folly of your youth--with a sigh perhaps, but you would have buried it. Isn't that true?" "It is true that something incredibly youthful seems to have persisted in me beyond its proper limits, and then to have died abruptly. God knows I have no youth in me to-day." "That may well be, but it need not have been. Youth does not die with the earlier illusions. If all had gone well, you would have been reborn into a saner and more conscious youth. Tell me--" Her voice trembled, but she moved forward resolutely and laid her muff against his chest; he could feel the working of her hands, and eyes and cheeks betrayed the excitement that pride still suppressed. "Tell me,--if you had waited, if you could have decently buried that old illusion and forgotten--and--and married me,--should you have felt very old?" "I should have felt immortal." He caught her hands from her muff and flung them about his neck and lifted her from the ground and kissed her as if they both stood on the pinnacle and had but a moment before plunging down to mortal death.