"Yes, it _is_ coarse. And it's yours quite as much as mine," she said, thoughtfully. "We _do_ belong to each other utterly, don't we? I never thought of it in that light before. And now our life has gone into your work, already! I can't tell you, Brice, how sweet it is to think of that love-business being our own! I shall be so proud of it on the stage! But as long as we live no one but ourselves must know anything about it. Do you suppose they will?" she asked, in sudden dismay. He smiled. "Should you care?" She reflected a moment. "No!" she shouted, boldly. "What difference?" "Godolphin would pay any sum for the privilege of using the fact as an advertisement. If he could put it into Pinney's hands, and give him _carte blanche_, to work in all the romance he liked--" "Brice!" she shrieked. "Well, we needn't give it away, and if _we_ don't, nobody else will." "No, and we must always keep it sacredly secret. Promise me one thing!" "Twenty!" "That you will let me hold your hand all through the first performance of that part. Will you?" "Why, we shall be set up like two brazen images in a box for all the first-nighters to stare at and the society reporters to describe. What would society journalism say to your holding my hand throughout the tender passages? It would be onto something personal in them in an instant." "No; now I will show you how we will do." They were sitting in a nook of the rocks, in the pallor of the late September sunshine, with their backs against a warm bowlder. "Now give me your hand." "Why, you've got hold of it already." "Oh yes, so I have! Well, I'll just grasp it in mine firmly, and let them both rest on your knee, so; and fling the edge of whatever I'm wearing on my shoulders over them, or my mantle, if it's hanging on the back of the chair, so"--she flung the edge of her shawl over their clasped hands to illustrate--"and nobody will suspect the least thing. Suppose the sea was the audience--a sea of faces you know; would any one dream down there that I was squeezing your hand at all the important moments, or you squeezing mine?" "I hope they wouldn't think me capable of doing anything so indelicate as squeezing a lady's hand," said Maxwell. "I don't know what they might think of you, though, if there was any such elaborate display of concealment as you've got up here." "Oh, this is merely rehearsing. Of course, I shall be more adroit, more careless, when I really come to it. But what I mean is that when we first see it together, the love-business, I shall want to feel that you are feeling every instant just as I do. Will you?" "I don't see any great objection to that. We shall both be feeling very anxious about the play, if that's what you mean." "That's what I mean in one sense," Louise allowed. "Sha'n't you be very anxious to see how they have imagined Salome and Atland?" "Not so anxious as about how Godolphin has 'created' Haxard."