Lydia's sudden happiness in the night and in his company--in knowing, too, she was well aware, that there was no Esther near--saw the cup dashed from her lips. Jeff didn't wait for her to answer. "From the boat," he said. "It was very short. She was with him. We weren't to send her any more money. She said she had taken his name." "How can she?" said Lydia stupidly. "She couldn't marry him." "Maybe she thinks she can," said Jeff. He was willing to keep alive her unthinking innocence. It was not the outcome of ignorance that cramps and stultifies. He meant Lydia should be a child for a long time. "Now, see. Her going makes it possible for me to be free--legally, I mean. When I can marry, Lydia--" He stopped there. They were walking on the narrow pavement, but not even their hands touched. "Do you love me," Jeff asked, "as much as you thought? That way, I mean?" "Yes," said Lydia. "But I know what you'd like. Not to talk about it, not to think about it much, but take care of Farvie--and you write--and both of us work on plays--and sometime--" "Yes," said Jeff, "sometime--" One tremendous desire, of all the desires tumultuous in him, was strongest. If Lydia was to be his--though already she seemed supremely his in all the shy fealties of the moment--not a petal of the flower of love should be lost to her. She should find them all dewy and unwithered in her bridal crown. There should not be a kiss, a hot protestation, the tawdry path of love half tasted yet long deferred. Lydia should, for the present, stay a child. His one dear thought, the thought that made him feel unimaginably free, came winging to him like a bird with messages. "We aren't," he said, "going to be prisoners, either of us." "No," said Lydia soberly. She knew by her talk with him and reading what he had imperfectly written, that he meant to be eternally free through fulfilling the incomprehensible paradox of binding himself to the law. "We aren't going to be downed by loving each other so we can't stand up to it and say we'll wait." "I can stand up to it," said Lydia. "I can stand up to anything--for you." "I don't know," he said, "just how we're coming out. I mean, I don't know whether I'm coming out something you'll like or not like. How can a man be sure what's in him? Shall I wake up some time and know, because I've been a thief, I ought never to think of anything now but money--paying back, cent for cent, or cents for dollars, what I lost? I don't know. Or shall I think I'm right in not doing anything spectacular and plodding along here and working for the town? I don't know that. One thing I know--you. If I said I loved you it wouldn't be a millionth part of what I do. I'm founded on you. I'm rooted in you. There! that's enough. Stop me. That's the thing I wasn't going to do." They were at their own gate. They halted there. "You'd better go down and find Anne and Farvie," said Lydia.