"Hope!" he said despondently, with a quick lifting of the shoulders. Then, in another tone-- "So that's your advice to me--to take this thing seriously--to take myself seriously--to think it out?" "Yes, yes," she said eagerly; "don't trifle with it--with what you might think and do--till it is too late to think and do anything." Suddenly it flashed across them both how far they had travelled since their first meeting in the spring. Her mind filled with a kind of dread, an uneasy sense of responsibility--then with a tremulous consciousness of power. It was as though she felt something fluttering like a bird in her hands. And all the time there echoed through her memory a voice speaking in a moonlit garden--"You know--you don't mind my saying it?--nobody is ever converted--politically--nowadays." No, but there may be honest advance and change--why not? And if she had influenced him--was it not Maxwell's work and thought that had spoken through her? "Well, anyway," said Tressady's voice beside her, "whatever happens--you'll believe--" "That you won't help to give us the _coup de grace_ unless you must?" she said, half laughing, yet with manifest emotion. "Anyway, I should have believed that." "And you really care so much?" he asked her again, looking at her wondering. She suddenly dropped her head upon her hands. They were alone now in the moonlit garden, and she was leaning over the low wall that divided them from the school enclosure. But before he could say anything--before he could even move closer to her--she had raised her face again, and drawn her hand rapidly across her eyes. "I suppose one is tired and foolish after all these weeks," she said, with a breaking voice--"I apologise. You see when one comes to see everything through another's eyes--to live in another's life--" He felt a sudden stab, then a leap of joy--hungry, desolate joy--that she should thus admit him to the very sanctuary of her heart--let him touch the "very pulse of the machine." At the same moment that it revealed the eternal gulf between them, it gave him a delicious passionate sense of intimity--of privilege. "You have--a marvellous idea of marriage"--he said, under his breath, as he moved slowly beside her towards the house. She made no answer. In another minute she was talking to him of indifferent things, and immediately afterwards he found himself parted from her in the crowd of the drawing-room. When the party dispersed and he was walking alone towards Aldgate through the night, he could do nothing but repeat to himself fragments of what she had said to him--lost all the time in a miserable yearning memory of her eyes and voice.