Brion stopped, and fell into such a deep and frowning reverie that the Captain would not venture to break into it for a while, but sat sipping his mulled wine, and glancing from time to time, with a curious amused expression, at the absorbed young figure. They were back at the _Cock_, and drinking a _night-cap_ in company. ‘You do not,’ said Raleigh at last, seeing the other stir, ‘blame me for this fiasco?’ Brion shook a disconsolate noddle. ‘I blame nobody. We are victims all, in different degree. But of what or whom?’ Seeing him inclined to a fresh fit of abstraction, Raleigh put in hastily:-- ‘Well, now it is resolved, I will confess it seemed to me an infatuation passing strange, and accountable to nothing, unless it were the worship of a golden idol. But there I wronged thee, and do ask thy pardon for it.’ ‘What else could you think? Yet, thy romantic mystery, forsooth, and poetry reduced to prose! O, God mend us all! Why would you not tell me how she looked to you?’ ‘Looks are like gospels, for each to construe according to his faith. Had my interpretation differed from yours, you’d ha’ damned me for a heretic.’ ‘But to dream I could have thought _that_ beautiful!’ His expression was so dismayed that Raleigh, after a vain attempt to control himself, went into a shout of laughter. ‘Well----’ began Brion; and his face quivered, and in a moment he was shaking too. ‘This riddle,’ said the soldier presently, gasping himself into sobriety--‘we must seek the clue to it.’ But on that Brion, returning to an instant seriousness, put a definite veto. ‘No further,’ said he. ‘I prithee from this moment let the whole question drop. I say it with all earnestness, and do entreat thee to let it rest as final.’ The other nodded: ‘Well, if you wish it’--and at that moment Clerivault, coming in with a faggot to lay on the embers, ended the discussion. ‘Signor Clerivault,’ said Raleigh, ‘is not beauty, in your opinion, a question of taste?’ Clerivault, depositing the log in its place, came frigidly upright. ‘I have no claim to a foreign title, Sir.’ ‘I should have said Master.’ The paragon bowed stately:-- ‘Sir, how taste?’ ‘Why, thus. I call a woman beautiful: another shakes his head. His eyes cannot see it; mine do. Therefore her beauty is not intrinsically in her, but in mine eyes. There is no standard to judge by.’ ‘There would be no beauty, Sir, if there were. Eternal conformation to a rigid model would make very deformity desirable by contrast.’ ‘Very true’--he showed an inclination to chuckle--‘I think some of us feel that. It is human to like change--even to pursue it on occasion to extremes. The loveliest of her sex will sometimes attach herself to the most repulsive of ours--and vice versa, it may hap. Hast ever been in love with a monstrosity yourself, Master Clerivault?’