ts and
painters received seldom in the course of the year. They were walking by
the river bank, and Katharine and Ralph, lagging a little behind, caught
fragments of his lecture. Katharine smiled at the sound of his voice;
she listened as if she found it a little unfamiliar, intimately though
she knew it; she tested it. The note of assurance and happiness was
new. William was very happy. She learnt every hour what sources of
his happiness she had neglected. She had never asked him to teach
her anything; she had never consented to read Macaulay; she had never
expressed her belief that his play was second only to the works of
Shakespeare. She followed dreamily in their wake, smiling and delighting
in the sound which conveyed, she knew, the rapturous and yet not servile
assent of Cassandra.

Then she murmured, "How can Cassandra--" but changed her sentence to the
opposite of what she meant to say and ended, "how could she herself have
been so blind?" But it was unnecessary to follow out such riddles when
the presence of Ralph supplied her with more interesting problems, which
somehow became involved with the little boat crossing the river, the
majestic and careworn City, and the steamers homecoming with their
treasury, or starting in search of it, so that infinite leisure would
be necessary for the proper disentanglement of one from the other. He
stopped, moreover, and began inquiring of an old boatman as to the tides
and the ships. In thus talking he seemed different, and even looked
different, she thought, against the river, with the steeples and towers
for background. His strangeness, his romance, his power to leave her
side and take part in the affairs of men, the possibility that they
should together hire a boat and cross the river, the speed and wildness
of this enterprise filled her mind and inspired her with such rapture,
half of love and half of adventure, that William and Cassandra were
startled from their talk, and Cassandra exclaimed, "She looks as if she
were offering up a sacrifice! Very beautiful," she added quickly, though
she repressed, in deference to William, her own wonder that the sight of
Ralph Denham talking to a boatman on the banks of the Thames could move
any one to such an attitude of adoration.

That afternoon, what with tea and the curiosities of the Thames tunnel
and the unfamiliarity of the streets, passed so quickly that the only
method of prolonging it was to plan another expedition for th