Baltazar, however, carried out none of Marcelle’s forebodings. He neither upbraided her nor smashed furniture, nor made one of his volcanic decisions. He merely lit a pipe and sat down and tried to think out his unqualified rejection. It was a second Zeppelin bomb, annihilating the castle in the air which that morning had appeared utterly solid and assured, as effectively as the first had wiped out Spendale Farm and all that it signified. He couldn’t make head or tail of it. He sat a mystified man. For him the glamour of the old days had not faded. In her ripe woman’s beauty she was more desirable than ever. Flashes had shown the continuance of her old wit and gaiety. Thank God she wasn’t eighteen still. What would he do with a child of eighteen? The association was unthinkable. But the woman into which she had developed was the ideal mate and companion. As for her being dead, that was rubbish. Never was woman more splendidly alive. . . . Now let him try to get her point of view. He clenched his teeth on his pipe. At eighteen she loved him. She made some sort of hero of him. She kept up her idealization until she met him an elderly, unromantic savage of fifty. Then her romance fell tumbling about her ears, and she said to herself, “Oh, my God! I can’t marry _this_!” It was the “_that_” which he had thought himself that the second bomb had sent into eternity. It took a lot of confused and blinking wonder for him to realize Marcelle’s “_this_.” Having realized, he accepted it grimly. He had a little passage of arms with her some days afterwards. She had invited it, anxious to know how deeply she had wounded. “I’m wretched because I feel I’ve again brought you unhappiness,” she confessed. “That you should be leading the life you wish to lead is my happiness,” he replied, not insincerely. “I feel so selfish,” she said. “Which means that if I pestered and blustered and raved and stormed and made your days a nightmare of remorse, you would end by marrying me out of desperation?” She shrugged her shoulders helplessly. “I suppose I should.” “Then I’m damned if I do it. You’d be merely a scared sort of slave of duty, suffering all the time from acute inflammation of the conscience. I being a product of human civilization, and not a German or a gorilla, or even a Hottentot, should be soon aware of the fact, and our lives would be the most exquisite misery the mind could conceive.” “I can’t see why you don’t hate me,” she said. “I think I’ve arrived at an understanding of the phenomenon,” he replied with a wry smile. “You might just as well try to recreate a vanished rainbow as a lost illusion.” He smiled. “Go in peace,” said he. To himself he said: “I wonder what will be the next knock-down blow.”