Having heard the entry and knowing that it must be Gerald who had entered, Sophia forced herself to remain still. A wild, splendid hope shot up in her. Constrained by all the power of her will not to move, she could not stifle a sob that had lain in ambush in her throat. The sound of the sob fetched tears to the eyes of Gerald. "Sophia!" he appealed to her. But she did not stir. Another sob shook her. "Very well, then," said Gerald. "We'll stay in London till we can be married. I'll arrange it. I'll find a nice boarding-house for you, and I'll tell the people you're my cousin. I shall stay on at this hotel, and I'll come and see you every day." A silence. "Thank you!" she blubbered. "Thank you!" He saw that her little gloved hand was stretching out towards him, like a feeler; and he seized it, and knelt down and took her clumsily by the waist. Somehow he dared not kiss her yet. An immense relief surged very slowly through them both. "I--I--really--" She began to say something, but the articulation was lost in her sobs. "What? What do you say, dearest?" he questioned eagerly. And she made another effort. "I really couldn't have gone to Paris with you without being married," she succeeded at last. "I really couldn't." "No, no!" he soothed her. "Of course you couldn't. It was I who was wrong. But you didn't know how I felt.... Sophia, it's all right now, isn't it?" She sat up and kissed him fairly. It was so wonderful and startling that he burst openly into tears. She saw in the facile intensity of his emotion a guarantee of their future happiness. And as he had soothed her, so now she soothed him. They clung together, equally surprised at the sweet, exquisite, blissful melancholy which drenched them through and through. It was remorse for having quarrelled, for having lacked faith in the supreme rightness of the high adventure. Everything was right, and would be right; and they had been criminally absurd. It was remorse; but it was pure bliss, and worth the quarrel! Gerald resumed his perfection again in her eyes! He was the soul of goodness and honour! And for him she was again the ideal mistress, who would, however, be also a wife. As in his mind he rapidly ran over the steps necessary to their marriage, he kept saying to himself, far off in some remote cavern of the brain: "I shall have her! I shall have her!" He did not reflect that this fragile slip of the Baines stock, unconsciously drawing upon the accumulated strength of generations of honest living, had put a defeat upon him.