I know asked a girl to marry
him he'd only known two hours."

"What very silly friends you must have, Mr. Palliser! Did she marry
him?"

"No! but they're engaged, and he's in Ceylon. But you wouldn't marry
me...."

"How on earth can you tell, in such a short time? What a goose you
are!... There!--the music's stopped, and Mrs. Nairn said that must
be the last waltz. Come along, or we shall catch it."

They had known each other exactly four hours!

Rosalind remembered it all, word for word. And how Gerry captured
a torn glove to keep; and when he came, as appointed, to lawn-tennis,
went back at once to Shakespeare, and said he had looked it up,
and it _was_ Beatrice and Benedict, and not Rosalind at all. She
could remember, too, her weary and reproachful _chaperon_, and the
well-deserved scolding she got for the way she had been going on
with that young Palliser. Eight dances!

So long ago! And she could think through it all again. And to him it
had become a memory of shreds and patches. Let it remain so, or become
again oblivion--vanish with the rest of his forgotten past! Her
thought that it would do so was confidence itself as she sat there
waiting for his footstep on the stair. For had she not spoken of
herself unflinchingly as the girl who said those words from
Shakespeare, and had not her asseveration slipped from the mind that
could not receive it as water slips from oil? She could wait there
without misgiving--could even hope that, whatever it was due to, this
recent stirring of the dead bones of memory might mean nothing, and
die away leaving all as it was before.

* * * * *

Sally, acknowledging physical fatigue with reluctance, after her long
walk and swim in the morning, went to bed. It presented itself to her
as a thing practicable, and salutary in her state of bewilderment, to
lie in bed with her eyes closed, and think over the events of the day.
It would be really quiet. And then she would be awake when Jeremiah
came in, and would call out for information if there was a sound of
anything to hear about. But her project fell through, for she had
scarcely closed her eyes when she fell into a trap laid for her by
sleep--deep sleep, such as we fancy dreamless. And when Fenwick came
back she could not have heard his words to her mother, even had they
risen above the choking undertone in which he spoke, nor her mother's
reply, more audible in its sudden alarm, but still k