Morris took this rebuff better than might have been expected. “Would you object if one ventured to call you an angel?” he asked. “Not if the word was used in a terrestrial sense. It excites a vision of possibilities, and the fib is so big that anyone must pardon it.” “Very well, then; I call you that.” “Thank you, I should be delighted to return the compliment. Can you think of any celestial definition appropriate to a young gentleman with dark eyes?” “Oh! Mary, please stop making fun of me,” said Morris, with something like a groan. “Why?” she asked innocently. “Besides I wasn’t making fun. It’s only my way of carrying on conversation; they taught it me at school, you know.” Morris made no answer; in fact, he did not know what on earth to say, or rather how to find the fitting words. After all, it was an accident and not his own intelligence that freed him from his difficulty. Mary moved a little, causing the white cloak, which was unfastened, to slip from her shoulders. Morris put out his hand to catch it, and met her hand. In another instant he had thrown his arm round her, drawn her to him, and kissed her on the lips. Then, abashed at what he had done, he let her go and picked up the cloak. “Might I ask?” began Mary in her usual sweet, low tones. Then her voice broke, and her blue eyes filled with tears. “I beg your pardon; I am a brute,” began Morris, utterly abased by the sight of these tears, which glimmered like pearls in the moonlight, “but, of course, you know what I mean.” Mary shook her head vacantly. Apparently she could not trust herself to speak. “Dear, will you take me?” She made no answer; only, after pausing for some few seconds as though lost in thought, with a little action more eloquent than any speech, she leant herself ever so slightly towards him. Afterwards, as she lay in his arms, words came to him readily enough: “I am not worth your having,” he said. “I know I am an odd fellow, not like other men; my very failings have not been the same as other men’s. For instance—before heaven it is true—you are the first woman whom I ever kissed, as I swear to you that you shall be the last. Then, what else am I? A failure in the very work that I have chosen, and the heir to a bankrupt property! Oh! it is not fair; I have no right to ask you!” “I think it quite fair, and here I am the judge, Morris.” Then, sentence by sentence, she went on, not all at once, but with breaks and pauses. “You asked me just now if I loved you, and I told you—Yes. But you did not ask me when I began to love you. I will tell you all the same. I can’t remember a time when I didn’t; no, not since I was a little girl. It was you who grew away from me, not me from you, when you took to studying mysticism and aerophones, and were repelled by all women, myself included.” “I know, I know,” he said. “Don’t remind me of my dead follies. Some things are born in the blood.”