"Nobody would hold a man blameless, in my circumstances, who made an offer of marriage to a young lady under...." "It's invidious to talk about people's ages." "I wasn't going to say twenty-one. I was going to say under her father's roof...." "Nobody ever makes offers of marriage on the top of anybody's father's roof. Besides, you never made any offer, strictly speaking. You said...." "I said that if I had my choice I would have chosen it all as it now is, only to hear your voice in the dark, rather than to be without it and have all the eyes of ... didn't I say Argus?" "Yes--you said Argus. But that was a _facon-de-parler_; at least I hope so, for the sake of the Hypothesis.... Oh dear!--what nonsense we two are talking...." Some silence; otherwise the _status quo_ remained unchanged. Then he said:--"_I_ wonder if it's all a dream and we shall wake." And she replied: "Not both--that's absurd!" But she made it more so by adding:--"Promise you'll tell me your dream when we wake, and I'll tell you mine." He assented:--"All right!--but don't let's wake yet." By now the sun was sinking in a flame of gold, and every little rabbit's shadow in the fern was as long as the tallest man's two hours since, and longer. The level glare was piercing the sheltered secrets of the beechwoods, and choosing from them ancient tree-trunks capriciously, to turn to sudden fires against the depths of hidden purple beyond--the fringe of the mantle the vanguard of night was weaving for the hills. Not a dappled fallow-deer in the coolest shade but had its chance of a robe of glory for a little moment--not a bird so sober in its plumage but became, if only it flew near enough to Heaven, a spark against the blue. And the long, unhesitating rays were not so busy with the world without, but that one of them could pry in at the five-light window at the west end of the Jacobean drawing-room at the Towers, and reach the marble Ceres the Earl's grandfather brought from Athens. And on the way it paused and dwelt a moment on a man's hand caressing the stray locks of a flood of golden hair he could not see--might never see at all. Or who might live on--such things have been--to find it grey to a half-illuminated sight in the dusk of life. So invisible to him now; so vivid in his memory of what seemed to him no more than a few days since! For half the time, remember, had been to him oblivion--a mere blank. And now, in the splendid intoxication of this new discovery, he could well afford to forget for the moment the black cloud that overhung the future, and the desperation that might well lie hidden in its heart, waiting for the day when he should know that Hope was dead. That day might come. "Shall I tell you now, my dearest, my heart, my life"--this is what he is saying, and every word he says is a mere truth to him; a sort of scientific fact--"shall I tell you what I was going to say an hour ago?..."