have been
twenty-five, and it was a short time for _that_ to have taken. However,
what I clutched at, what I clung to, was that it was a nervous
twenty-five. I might pay for her assurance, but wasn't there something
of mine for which _she_ might pay? I was nervous also, but, as I took in
again, with a glance through our great chain of chambers, the wonderful
conditions that protected us, I did my best to feel sure that it was
only because I was so amused. That--in so high a form--was what it came
to in the end. "I supposed," I replied, "that you'd have arranged; for,
in spite of the way things were going, I hadn't given you up. I haven't
understood, I confess," I went on, "why you've preferred a conference so
intensely nocturnal--of which I quite feel, however, that, if it has
happened to suit you, it isn't for me to complain. But I felt sure of
you--that was the great thing--from the moment, half an hour ago, you so
kindly spoke to me. I gave you, you see," I laughed, "what's called
'rope.'"

"I don't suppose you mean," she exclaimed, "for me to hang myself!--for
that, I assure you, is not at all what I'm prepared for." Then she
seemed again to give me the magnificence of her youth. It wasn't,
throughout, I was to feel, that she at all had abysses of irony, for she
in fact happily needed none. Her triumph was in itself ironic enough,
and all her point in her sense of her freshness. "Were you really so
impatient?" But as I inevitably hung fire a little she continued before
I could answer; which somewhat helped me indeed by showing the one flaw
in her confidence. More extraordinary perhaps than anything else,
moreover, was just my perception of this; which gives the value of all
that each of us so visibly felt the other to have put together, to have
been making out and gathering in, since we parted, on the terrace, after
seeing Mrs. Server and Briss come up from under their tree. We _had_, of
a truth, arrived at our results--though mine were naturally the ones for
me to believe in; and it was prodigious that we openly met not at all
where we had last left each other, but exactly on what our subsequent
suppressed processes had achieved. We hadn't named them--hadn't alluded
to them, and we couldn't, no doubt, have done either; but they were none
the less intensely there between us, with the whole bright, empty scene
given up to them. Only she had her shrewd sense that mine, for reasons,
might have been still more occult t