When Grafton left Maurice's room he went to the Long Gallery, where Caroline was sitting with Miss Waterhouse. When Caroline went away he stayed there. Miss Waterhouse had not yet expressed herself to him. "Well, Dragon, what do you think of it all?" he asked her. "I think you have been very wise, and very kind," she said. "It had to be--eh?" "Yes, I think it had to be, under the circumstances." "What do you mean by the circumstances?" "When two young people are brought together in the way they have been, I think love is likely to come of it." Her answer made him vaguely uneasy. "That's what the world will say," he said. "If it were only that, it wouldn't be very satisfactory, would it? Don't you see a deeper suitability in it than there is on the surface? It's what I have to look for, to make it bearable." "I think there is what you call a deeper suitability. I think Caroline will be happy in her marriage, when the time comes for it." "You're not very enthusiastic, Dragon. Is _she_ satisfied with your view of it?" "I was the only person who knew anything until you came home. I sympathised with her. I saw how deep her love was. But I couldn't be enthusiastic until I knew how you would take it. I couldn't have said that you would have been wrong in asking at least for a term of probation, as you did in Beatrix's case." "But I didn't ask for it--because I trusted Caroline to have faced all the objections she would know I should feel, and just exactly _not_ to have allowed herself to fall in love owing to what you call the circumstances. She would know what she wanted, I said to myself. And she wouldn't change, whatever I did or said. It wouldn't have come to an end of itself, as Beatrix's affair did. I hope you're not going to say that my reasoning was wrong. It hasn't been very easy to sink all my own ideas--of fitness--of what one would expect in marriage for a girl like Caroline." "I think you've been entirely right; more right than if you'd stood out, or even questioned it. It would have made no difference, and you'd have had to give way in the end. Nothing you could have done or said would have so added to dear Caroline's happiness as what you have said and done. She was dreading more than anything a separation in spirit from you. I know that, though she said little about it. Now that fear is removed she is blissfully happy. Nothing that anybody else says will matter to her at all." "And yet you don't seem to think I reached my conclusions in the right way." "What I think is that she couldn't have reasoned it out in the way you thought she had. A woman doesn't reason like that--or at least she doesn't. It was just her heart that guided her." "But she did reason. She told me that if he hadn't been what she has found out for herself that he is, and she'd been inclined to fall in love with him--just in the way you say she has, with gratitude, and pity, working in her--I suppose that's what you mean--she'd have resisted it."