may keep it
unbroken...."

"And I care nothing!" It was her eyes meeting his that stopped him. He
could read the meaning of her words in them before they were spoken.
Then he replied in a voice less firm than before:

"Dare we--knowing what I am, knowing what may come suddenly, any hour
of the day, out of the unknown--_dare_ we call it love?" Perhaps in
Fenwick's mind at this moment the predominant feeling was terror of the
consequences to her that marriage with him might betray her into. It
was much stronger than any misgiving (although a little remained) of
her feelings toward himself.

"What else can we call it? It is a good old word." She said this quite
calmly, with a very happy face one could see the flush of pleasure
and success on even in the moonlight, and there was no reluctance,
no shrinking in her, from her share of the outcome the Major had not
waited to see. "Millais' Huguenot" was complete. Rosalind Graythorpe,
or Palliser, stood there again with her husband's arm round her--her
husband of twenty years ago! And in that fact was the keynote of what
there was of unusual--of unconventional, one might almost phrase it--in
her way of receiving and requiting his declaration. It hardly need be
said that _he_ was unconscious of any such thing. A man whose soul
is reeling with the intoxication of a new-found happiness is not
overcritical about the exact movement of the hand that has put the
cup to his lips.

The Huguenot arrangement might have gone on in the undisturbed
moonlight till the chill of the morning came to break it up if a
cab-wheel _crescendo_ and a _strepitoso_ peal at the bell had not
announced Sally, who burst into the house and rushed into the
drawing-room tumultuously, to be corrected back by a serious word from
Ann, the door-opener, that Missis and Mr. Fenwick had stepped out in
the garden. Ann's parade of her conviction that this was _en regle_,
when no one said it wasn't, was suggestive in the highest degree.
Professional perjury in a law-court could not have been more
self-conscious. Probably Ann knew all about it, as well as cook. Sally
saw nothing. She was too full of great events at Ladbroke Grove
Road--the sort of events that are announced with a preliminary, What
_do_ you think, N or M? And then develop the engagement of O to P, or
the jilting of Q by R.

There was just time for a dozen words between the components of the
Millais group in the moonlight.

"Shall we tell Sally?" It