Their human questions became many before they had done—many more, as one after the other came up, than our friend’s free fancy had at all foreseen. The sense he had had before, the sense he had had repeatedly, the sense that the situation was running away with him, had never been so sharp as now; and all the more that he could perfectly put his finger on the moment it had taken the bit in its teeth. That accident had definitely occurred, the other evening, after Chad’s dinner; it had occurred, as he fully knew, at the moment when he interposed between this lady and her child, when he suffered himself so to discuss with her a matter closely concerning them that her own subtlety, marked by its significant “Thank you!” instantly sealed the occasion in her favour. Again he had held off for ten days, but the situation had continued out of hand in spite of that; the fact that it was running so fast being indeed just _why_ he had held off. What had come over him as he recognised her in the nave of the church was that holding off could be but a losing game from the instant she was worked for not only by her subtlety, but by the hand of fate itself. If all the accidents were to fight on her side—and by the actual showing they loomed large—he could only give himself up. This was what he had done in privately deciding then and there to propose she should breakfast with him. What did the success of his proposal in fact resemble but the smash in which a regular runaway properly ends? The smash was their walk, their déjeuner, their omelette, the Chablis, the place, the view, their present talk and his present pleasure in it—to say nothing, wonder of wonders, of her own. To this tune and nothing less, accordingly, was his surrender made good. It sufficiently lighted up at least the folly of holding off. Ancient proverbs sounded, for his memory, in the tone of their words and the clink of their glasses, in the hum of the town and the plash of the river. It _was_ clearly better to suffer as a sheep than as a lamb. One might as well perish by the sword as by famine. “Maria’s still away?”—that was the first thing she had asked him; and when he had found the frankness to be cheerful about it in spite of the meaning he knew her to attach to Miss Gostrey’s absence, she had gone on to enquire if he didn’t tremendously miss her. There were reasons that made him by no means sure, yet he nevertheless answered “Tremendously”; which she took in as if it were all she had wished to prove. Then, “A man in trouble _must_ be possessed somehow of a woman,” she said; “if she doesn’t come in one way she comes in another.” “Why do you call me a man in trouble?” “Ah because that’s the way you strike me.” She spoke ever so gently and as if with all fear of wounding him while she sat partaking of his bounty. “_Aren’t_ you in trouble?”