Merivale soon returned, still smilingly unruffled, and still in soaking clothes. But he seemed to be unconscious of them, and sat down in the verandah by Evelyn. Since that terrific clap there had been no return of the thunder, but the rain was beginning to fall again, slow, steady, and sullen from the low and dripping sky. He saw at once that something had happened to Evelyn; he was trembling like some startled animal. But since he held that to force or even suggest a confidence was a form of highway robbery, he forbore from any questioning. "So you were with Miss Ellington during the storm," he said. "How I love that superb violence of elements! It is such a relief to know that there are still forces in the world which are quite untamable, and that by no possibility can Lady Ellington divert the lightning into accumulators, which will light our houses." Evelyn turned on him a perfectly vacant face; he seemed not to have heard even. "What did Lady Ellington do?" he asked. "She attended when I talked to her," said the Hermit, with pardonable severity. Evelyn pulled himself together. "Look here, something's happened," he said briefly. "It's--I've told her that I love her. And that's all; it's a rope dangling in the air, nothing more happened. She just said I had better go to another room. She made no direct answer at all; she wasn't even shocked." Then the tiny details began to be gathered in his mind, as if a man swept the fallen leaves from the stricken tree into a heap. "She gave a sort of cry," he said, "but at the end it was a moan. She threw her arms wide, and then held them to keep me off. What does it mean? What does it all mean?" He got up quickly and began walking up and down the verandah. "Where is she?" he said. "I must see her again. I must say what I said again, and tell her she must answer me." The Hermit, for all his inhuman life, had some glimmerings of sense. "You must do nothing of the sort," he said. "You don't seem to realise what you have done already. Why, she is engaged to Philip, to your friend, and you have told her you love her. Good gracious, is not that enough to make her moan?" "I told you I should a week ago," said Evelyn. "Yes, but you told me that conditionally. You said you would do so when you saw she loved you. Instead---- Good heavens! Evelyn, you must be unaware of what you have done. You were left with the girl during a thunderstorm, a thing that excites you and terrifies her, and you took advantage of your excitement and her terror to say this. It's ugly; it's beastly. But I can say it isn't like you." Evelyn showed no sign of resenting this. As far as the mere criticism of what he had done was concerned, he appeared merely to feel a speculator's interest in how it all struck another spectator. Even Lady Ellington's hard, polished mind could not have presented a surface more impervious to scratches.