'It's late. I won't ask you in.' 'You are over-tired. Go to bed.' 'I wish I could. I'm dining out.' He looked at her out of kind eyes. 'It begins to be dreadfully stuffy in town. I'm glad, after all, we're going on that absurd yachting trip.' 'I'm not going,' she said. 'Oh, nonsense! Sophia and I would break our hearts.' 'I'm sure about Sophia.' 'It will do you good to come and have a look at the Land of the Midnight Sun,' he said. 'I'm going to have a look at the Land of Midnight where there's no sun. And everybody but you and Sophia and my sister will think I'm in Norway.' When she explained, he broke out: 'It's the very wildest nonsense that ever---- It would kill you.' The intensity of his opposition made him incoherent. 'You, of all women in the world! A creature who can't even stand people who say "serviette" instead of "table-napkin"!' 'Fancy the little Blunt having been in prison!' 'Oh, let the little Blunt go to----' He checked himself. 'Be reasonable, child.' He turned and looked at her with an earnestness she had never seen in his eyes before. 'Why in heaven should _you_----' 'Why? You heard what that woman said.' 'I heard _nothing_ to account for----' 'That's partly,' she interrupted, 'why I must make this experiment. When a man like you--as good a man as you'--she repeated with slow wonder--'when you and all the other good men that the world is full of--when you all know everything that that woman knows--and more! and yet see nothing in it to account for what she feels, and what I--I too, am beginning to feel----!' she broke off. 'Good-bye! If I go far on this new road, it's you I shall have to thank.' 'I?' He shrugged drearily at the absurd charge, making no motion to take the offered hand, but sat there in the corner of the hansom looking rather old and shrunken. 'You and one other,' she said. That roused him. 'Ah, he has come, then.' 'Who?' 'The other. The man who is going to count.' Her eyelids drooped. 'The man who was to count most for me came a long while ago. And a long while ago--he went.' Borrodaile looked at her. 'But this---- Who is the gentleman who shares with me the doubtful, I may without undue modesty say the undeserved, honour of urging you to disappear into the slums? Who is it?' 'The man who wrote this.' It was the book he had seen in her hands before the meeting. He read on the green cover, 'In the Days of the Comet.' 'Oh, that fellow! Well, he's not my novelist, but it's the keenest intelligence we have applied to fiction.'