He heard it with amazement too; heard in his own mouth the note of triumph, of a triumph which seemed to put an end to all his hopes, to mock with its thin pretence the lost promise of such a moment, the passionate exultation which it might have yielded him. Yet he heard it; that was something; and, though he hardly knew what he was saying, he could read its radiant answer upon the girl's face. If he was missing the full measure of the hour--and that was to put his misfortune meagrely--she at least had not suspected it. He had that single satisfaction--but, to his schooling, a supreme one--the reflection, as he voiced it to his trouble, that he was 'playing the game.' He was inspired to suggest tea. They had brought it with them, and, though it might have seemed a higher compliment to forget both that and the hour, it was one that Maurice had not the pluck to pay. He still felt to be an intruder to the occasion, to be sustaining what some one else had achieved. The sense of duplicity made him clumsy as a man under a load; he could not use with a lover's audacity the exquisite immaturity of the moment. The very kisses which her eyes expected left a traitor's taste upon his lips. Action, though it was but tea-making, gave him breathing space; it dismissed, for a while at least, the most protesting part of him from service into which so breathlessly it had been pressed. With a kettle in his hand, and under shelter of the hamper, his irresponsible buoyancy came back to him, his humorous appreciation of circumstance even when it told so heavily against himself; and his talk across the table he was spreading was only a shade too vivid to be a lover's. Its gay note was thrown up by the girl's silence; a silence lightened only by a happy nod or smile. She seemed to wish, sitting intently there, to feel her senses afloat on the invading flood of his devotion, as a boat is floated by the incoming tide. It was for that she sat so still, unwilling by any impulse of her own, to dilute her consciousness of this strange strong thing, which crept to her very skin and carried her away, surgingly intimate as the living sea. Maurice had set her silence down to shyness, till something in the soft rapture of her face told him its true meaning. The pathos of that and, for him, the shame of it, hurt him as an air too rare to breathe. The thought of this woman measuring with grateful wonderment the magnitude of a thing which had no existence, but in which he had brought her to believe, wrung him with a keen distress. And in that sharp moment of shame and pity he came very near loving her; came near enough, at any rate, to dedicate the future to her illusion.