It was a lengthy silence in which he thought these things. She, in the silence, had been making little patterns with bread-crumbs till the waiter swept all away, made their table tidy, and brought the dessert. She looked up from the table-cloth just in time to see Edward smile grimly. "What is it?" she asked, a little timidly. "I was only thinking," he said, "what a two-penny halfpenny business we've made of life, with our electric light and our motors and our ugly houses and our civilization generally. A civilization replete with every modern inconvenience! In the good old days nobody would have minded a knight and a princess traveling through the world together, or even around the world, for that matter. Whereas now. . . ." She looked at him, gauging this thought. And he knew that he had said enough to make a stupid woman say, "I thought you would want to back out of it." What would she say? For a moment she said nothing. Then, sure of herself as of him, she smiled and said: "We're going to teach Nobody to mind . . . its own business." And then he said what he had come near to being afraid she would say. "You don't want to back out of it, then?" he said, and she shook her head. "No," she answered, slowly, and then, after a pause, again, "No." "You are willing to go through the wood with your faithful knight, Princess? He will be a faithful knight." "Yes," she said, "I know." And then suddenly he perceived what before had not been plain to him--that the elopement that had seemed to offer so royal a road to all that he really desired was not a road, but a barrier. That he was now in a position far less advantageous than that of a man who meets a girl all hedged around with the machinery of chaperonage, since, whereas the courtship may, where there is chaperonage, evade and escape it, where there is none the lover must himself supply its need--must, in fine, be lover and chaperon in one. Far from placing himself in a position where love-making would be easy, he had set himself where it was well-nigh impossible. He who courts a lady in her own home, surrounded by all the fences set up by custom and convention, can, at least, be sure that if his courtship be unwelcome it will be rejected. The lady need not listen unless she will. But when the princess rides through the wood with the knight whom she has chosen to be her champion she must needs listen if he chooses to speak. She can, of course, leave him and his championing, but what sort of championship is it which drives the princess back to the very dragon from which it rescued her? Edward saw, with dismal exactness, the intolerable impossibilities of the situation. They would go on--supposing her friends didn't interfere--as friends and comrades, brother and sister, she more and more friendly, he more and more tongue-tied, till at last every spark of the fire of the great adventure was trampled out by the flat foot of habit.