ke more than the whole night--even if we had it!"

"By which you suggest that we haven't it?"

"No--we haven't it. I want to get away."

"To go to bed? I thought you were so keen."

"I _am_ keen. Keen is no word for it. I don't want to go to bed. I want
to get away."

"To leave the house--in the middle of the night?"

"Yes--absurd as it may seem. You excite me too much. You don't know what
you do to me."

He continued to look at me; then he gave a laugh which was not the
contradiction, but quite the attestation, of the effect produced on him
by my grip. If I had wanted to hold him I held him. It only came to me
even that I held him too much. I felt this in fact with the next thing
he said. "If you're too excited, then, to be coherent now, will you tell
me to-morrow?"

I took time myself now to relight. Ridiculous as it may sound, I had my
nerves to steady; which is a proof, surely, that for real excitement
there are no such adventures as intellectual ones. "Oh, to-morrow I
shall be off in space!"

"Certainly we shall neither of us be here. But can't we arrange, say, to
meet in town, or even to go up together in such conditions as will
enable us to talk?"

I patted his arm again. "Thank you for your patience. It's really good
of you. Who knows if I shall be alive to-morrow? We _are_ meeting. We
_do_ talk."

But with all I had to think of I must have fallen, on this, into the
deepest of silences, for the next thing I remember is his returning: "We
don't!" I repeated my gesture of reassurance, I conveyed that I should
be with him again in a minute, and presently, while he gave me time, he
came back to something of his own. "My wink, at all events, would have
been nothing for any question between us, as I've just said, without
yours. That's what I call your responsibility. It was, as we put the
matter, the torch of your analogy----"

"Oh, the torch of my analogy!"

I had so groaned it--as if for very ecstasy--that it pulled him up, and
I could see his curiosity as indeed reaffected. But he went on with a
coherency that somewhat admonished me: "It was your making me, as I told
you this morning, think over what you had said about Brissenden and his
wife: it was _that_----"

"That made you think over"--I took him straight up--"what you yourself
had said about our troubled lady? Yes, precisely. That _was_ the torch
of my analogy. What I showed you in the one case seemed to tell you what
to look for in the oth