She was not quite pleased and not altogether offended at his addressing them dually. A curious sense of impropriety in the state of things bewildered her--she and her friend talking thus, in the moonlight, on the sea-shore, doing nothing, with her friend’s groom--and such a groom, his mistress asking him to sing again, and he addressing them both with a remark on the beauty of the night! She had braved the world a good deal, but she did not choose to brave it where nothing was to be had, and she was too honest to say to herself that the world would never know--that there was nothing to brave: she was not one to do that in secret to which she would not hold her face. Yet all the time she had a doubt whether this young man, whom it would certainly be improper to encourage by addressing from any level but one of lofty superiority, did not belong to a higher sphere than theirs; while certainly no man could be more unpresuming, or less forward even when opposing his opinion to theirs. Still--if an angel were to come down and take charge of their horses, would ladies be justified in treating him as other than a servant? “This is just the sort of night,” Malcolm resumed, “when I could almost persuade myself I was not quite sure I wasn’t dreaming. It makes a kind of border land betwixt waking and sleeping, knowing and dreaming, in our brain. In a night like this I fancy we feel something like the colour of what God feels when he is making the lovely chaos of a new world, a new kind of world, such as has never been before.” “I think we had better go in,” said Clementina to Florimel, and turned away. Florimel made no objection, and they walked towards the wood. “You really must get rid of him as soon as you can,” said Clementina, when again the moonless night of the pines had received them: “he is certainly more than half a lunatic. It is almost full moon now,” she added, looking up. “I have never seen him so bad.” Florimel’s clear laugh rang through the wood. “Don’t be alarmed, Clementina,” she said. “He has talked like that ever since I knew him; and if he is mad, at least he is no worse than he has always been. It is nothing but poetry--yeast on the brain, my father used to say. We should have a fish-poet of him-- a new thing in the world, he said. He would never be cured till he broke out in a book of poetry. I should be afraid my father would break the catechism and not rest in his grave till the resurrection, if I were to send Malcolm away.” For Malcolm, he was at first not a little mazed at the utter blankness of the wall against which his words had dashed themselves. Then he smiled queerly to himself, and said: