This time he dipped the oars very slowly indeed; and, while for a period that was longer than it seemed to them they floated vaguely, they mainly sat and glowed at each other as if everything had been settled. There were reasons enough why Nick should be happy; but it is a singular fact that the leading one was the sense of his having escaped a great and ugly mistake. The final result of his mother's appeal to him the day before had been the idea that he must act with unimpeachable honour. He was capable of taking it as an assurance that Julia had placed him under an obligation a gentleman could regard but in one way. If she herself had understood it so, putting the vision, or at any rate the appreciation, of a closer tie into everything she had done for him, the case was conspicuously simple and his course unmistakably plain. That is why he had been gay when he came out of the house to look for her: he could be gay when his course was plain. He could be all the gayer, naturally, I must add, that, in turning things over as he had done half the night, what he had turned up oftenest was the recognition that Julia now had a new personal power with him. It was not for nothing that she had thrown herself personally into his life. She had by her act made him live twice as intensely, and such an office, such a service, if a man had accepted and deeply tasted it, was certainly a thing to put him on his honour. He took it as distinct that there was nothing he could do in preference that wouldn't be spoiled for him by any deflexion from that point. His mother had made him uncomfortable by bringing it so heavily up that Julia was in love with him--he didn't like in general to be told such things; but the responsibility seemed easier to carry and he was less shy about it when once he was away from other eyes, with only Julia's own to express that truth and with indifferent nature all about. Besides, what discovery had he made this morning but that he also was in love? "You've got to be a very great man, you know," she said to him in the middle of the lake. "I don't know what you mean about my salon, but I _am_ ambitious." "We must look at life in a large, bold way," he concurred while he rested his oars. "That's what I mean. If I didn't think you could I wouldn't look at you." "I could what?" "Do everything you ought--everything I imagine, I dream of. You _are_ clever: you can never make me believe the contrary after your speech on Tuesday, Don't speak to me! I've seen, I've heard, and I know what's in you. I shall hold you to it. You're everything you pretend not to be." Nick looked at the water while she talked. "Will it always be so amusing?" he asked. "Will what always be?" "Why my career." "Shan't I make it so?" "Then it will be yours--it won't be mine," said Nick. "Ah don't say that--don't make me out that sort of woman! If they should say it's me I'd drown myself." "If they should say what's you?"