“‘Come with me. I don’t propose that you should go alone.’ “She frowned a little; and in that frown I read all the weariness of the hours of past talk with Madame C. Presently she looked up at me, very kindly, a little questioningly, as if for the first time my personality in itself interested her. “‘You know that--even for me--that is impossible.’ “I knew what she meant: that she would have been ready for any abnegation, being, herself, as I have said, negligible; but that the world must be able to pick no flaw in the rites paid to the shade. “‘If you will many me, it is not impossible.’ “That is what I said--just like that. I had determined that nothing should be an obstacle. She didn’t change her posture or her expression by the fraction of a millimetre. She looked silently past me at the ilexes as if she had not heard. But she had heard. I think that at that moment--no, I don’t except all that came after--I touched the highest point of my romance.... She thought for a moment or two while I waited. I suppose she was considering what the world would say to that, and deciding that the world would have no right to say anything; that it would be, and legitimately so, between her and me. The dead themselves, of course, can be trusted to understand. It didn’t take her long--you see she was a girl of one idea, and of one idea only. “‘Very well, I will marry you.’ The words came as simply from her lips as any others. We didn’t at that time, or at any time before our marriage, have any discussion of the extremely--shall I say?--individual nature of our relation. That was the one thing we couldn’t have talked of. It would have been--you see?--quite impossible for either to imply, by approaching the subject, that the other perhaps didn’t understand. I couldn’t even be so crass as to say: ‘Look here, my dear girl, of course I quite recognize that you don’t in any sense belong to me’; or she be so crass as to say in turn: ‘I know it.’ No: I suppose I have never been so near the summit as I was that evening after she had ‘accepted’ me, and we had both silently laid our freedom on the altar of that dead man. Neither of us realized all the inevitable practical results of such a compact. We simply thought we had thrown the ultimate sufficing sop to Cerberus, and that all our lives we should hear him contentedly crunching it. I am quite sure that her mind turned as blank a face to the future as mine. Quite.” His voice rang authoritatively across the table. I said nothing. What could I say? What is the proper greeting when you cross the threshold of such a habitation? I offered him a silence that was at least respectful.