The duration of the exchange was assuredly to have been measured but in seconds, though in no such number of them had so much happened up to now, by Ralph's private measure, which indeed had considerably grown; only he couldn't not keep looking at Perry--wish as he might to explain, to go on explaining, for the benefit of the others, whose three pair of eyes treated him with anxiety, with admiration, or to the effect again of the sinister estrangement, whichever of these things it might be. The great reality was that his words, as they came, had to mean most to Perry, and could only come thus also by the help of his horror. That horror, by the end of a couple of moments, was what he was afraid of for the others still more than of his own queer visionary pull-up, his invitation to them to see him in presence of the Drydown sideboard, or whatever the ambiguous object, and then see him, in the very act, both turn his back upon it and try to scatter gold-dust round his revulsion. "I'm not a prophet or a soothsayer, and still less a charlatan, and don't pretend to the gift of second sight--I only confess to have cultivated my imagination, as one has to in a country where there is nothing to take that trouble off one's hands. Therefore perhaps it is that things glimmer upon me at moments from a distance, so that I find myself in the act of catching them, but am liable to lose them again, and to feel nervous, as if I had made a fool of myself, when an honest man like my cousin Perry looks at me as if he thought me a little mad. I'm _not_ mad, cousin Perry--I'm only a mite bewildered by the way I seem to affect you, since it might be catching for your mother and Molly and Sir Cantopher if I didn't convince you that I don't on the whole confess myself anything worse than rather a free talker." "I like your free talk--I like it, I like it!" Molly broke in at this. "I wouldn't have it a bit different, though we have certainly never heard anything like it in all our lives. I'm not afraid of you now," the girl continued, "or else I'm no more so than I want to be--for I think I told you a while ago that I should miss your not sometimes putting me in fear. If you're doing that now--and I see you _are_ doing it to Perry, whom I declare I'm sorry for!--I'm enjoying it still more than I could have hoped, and wishing I could only have some of my friends about me to see my pride, which means perhaps to see what _they_ would make of you for a grand match. You'll understand that I'm in the greatest possible hurry to show you off," Miss Midmore wound up. "Ah but I don't engage to perform by appointment," Ralph laughed--"at least in the sense of making our friends uneasy."