It was Perry who took this up first, though not till after an interval, curiously prolonged to Ralph's measure, during which that appearance for our friend of his companions' helpless failure of any sign of their reading into his solicitous speech an imputable sense, however off-hand the imputation, amounted practically to a rupture of relation with them and presented them to his vision, during a series of moments, wellnigh as an artful, a wonderful trio, some mechanic but consummate imitation of ancient life, staring through the vast plate of a museum. It was for all the world as if his own interpretation grew, under this breath of a crisis, exactly by the lapse of theirs, lasting long enough to suggest that his very care for them had somehow annihilated them, or had at least converted them to the _necessarily_ void and soundless state. He could understand that they didn't, and that this would have made them take him for mad, the chill and the dismay of which--felt for that matter by Ralph too--turned them to stone or wood or wax, or whatever it was they momentarily most resembled. The chill was a true felt drop of the temperature, the waft across them all of a mortal element, mortal at least to the others and menacing, should it have continued, to himself. That it couldn't possibly have continued, at such a portentous pitch, however, was the next instant standing out to sharpness in the fact of natural sound, sound borne up to them as from the cobbles of the Square and floating familiar life back to them. Perry's voice it was, positively, that had the warmth, and that was already, for the good of all of them, translating the suspense into terms. "Are you ready for Sir Cantopher?" he asked of Ralph with a pertinence which, as soon as thus attested, seemed to have picked up our young man's declaration with an overreaching hand. _There_ was something they could rally to, particularly as a loud rubadubdub at the door had followed the report of arrested coach-wheels before it. "Ah, there the dear man is!" Mrs. Midmore at once recovered her faculty to say--even if all to the immediate effect of calling on Ralph first to search his own. "Sir Cantopher, Sir Cantopher?" It was nature again for Ralph even if it was in its prime newness uncertainty. And it was uncertainty but just enough to prepare his glow of response. "Sir Cantopher Bland? Why, there's nothing I shall more prize than the honour of his acquaintance." "He looks forward eagerly to the pleasure of yours," Mrs. Midmore remarked with clear assurance; so that Molly was the last to speak--which she did all to the tune again of her own high colour. "I hope it won't interfere with your liking him, sir, that as you've been so taken with the fancy of my sister, he's taken worse still and from years and years ago." "Oh he's in love with her? Yes surely, I know that--know it now," Ralph added.