“You mean he must be more than a remarkable person,” suggested Hood, “a sort of giant with a hundred hands or god with a hundred eyes. Well, a man will work frightfully hard when he wants something very much; even a man who generally looks like a lounging minor poet. And I think I know what it was he wanted. He deserves to get it. It’s certainly his hour of triumph.” “Mystery to me, all the same,” said the Colonel frowning. “Wonder whether he’ll ever clear it up.” But that part of the mystery was not to be cleared up until many other curious things had come to pass. Away on another part of the slope Hilary Pierce, new lighted on the earth like the herald Mercury, leapt down into a red hollow of the quarry and came towards Joan Hardy with uplifted arms. “This is no time for false modesty,” he said. “It is the hour, and I come to you covered with glory----” “You come covered with mud,” she said smiling, “and it’s that horrible red mud that takes so long to dry. It’s no use trying to brush it till----” “I bring you the Golden Fleece, or at any rate the Golden Pig-Skin,” he cried in lyric ecstasy. “I have endured the labours; I have achieved the quest. I have made the Hampshire Hog as legendary as the Calydonian Boar. They forbade me to drive it on foot, and I drove it in a car, disguised as a pug. They forbade me to bring it in a car, and I brought it in a railway-train, disguised as an invalid. They forbade me to use a railway-train, and I took the wings of the morning and rose to the uttermost parts of the air; by a way secret and pathless and lonely as the wilful way of love. I have made my romance immortal. I have written your name upon the sky. What do you say to me now? I have turned a Pig into a Pegasus. I have done impossible things.” “I know you have,” she said, “but somehow I can’t help liking you for all that.” “_But_ you can’t help liking me,” he repeated in a hollow voice. “I have stormed heaven, but still I am not so bad. Hercules can be tolerated in spite of his Twelve Labours. St. George can be forgiven for killing the Dragon. Woman, is this the way I am treated in the hour of victory; and is this the graceful fashion of an older world? Have you become a New Woman, by any chance? What has your father been doing? What does he say--about us?” “My father says you are quite mad, of course,” she replied, “but he can’t help liking you either. He says he doesn’t believe in people marrying out of their class; but that if I must marry a gentleman he’d rather it was somebody like you, and not one of the new gentlemen.” “Well, I’m glad I’m an old gentleman, anyhow,” he answered somewhat mollified. “But really this prevalence of common sense is getting quite dangerous. Will nothing rouse you all to a little unreality; to saying, so to speak, ‘O, for the wings of a pig that I might flee away and be at rest.’ What would you say if I turned the world upside-down and set my foot upon the sun and moon?”