harmonious hour, a lurid grandeur to his good faith. It
was meanwhile too a sign of the kind of sensibility often playing up
in him that--fabulous as this truth may sound--he found a sentimental
link, an obligation of delicacy, or perhaps even one of the penalties
of its opposite, in his having exposed her to the north light, the quite
properly hard business-light, of the room in which they had been alone
with the treasure and its master. She had listened to the name of
the sum he was capable of looking in the face. Given the relation of
intimacy with him she had already, beyond all retractation, accepted,
the stir of the air produced at the other place by that high figure
struck him as a thing that, from the moment she had exclaimed or
protested as little as he himself had apologised, left him but one thing
more to do. A man of decent feeling didn't thrust his money, a huge lump
of it, in such a way, under a poor girl's nose--a girl whose
poverty was, after a fashion, the very basis of her enjoyment of his
hospitality--without seeing, logically, a responsibility attached. And
this was to remain none the less true for the fact that twenty minutes
later, after he had applied his torch, applied it with a sign or two of
insistence, what might definitely result failed to be immediately clear.
He had spoken--spoken as they sat together on the out-of-the-way bench
observed during one of their walks and kept for the previous quarter of
the present hour well in his memory's eye; the particular spot to which,
between intense pauses and intenser advances, he had all the while
consistently led her. Below the great consolidated cliff, well on to
where the city of stucco sat most architecturally perched, with the
rumbling beach and the rising tide and the freshening stars in front
and above, the safe sense of the whole place yet prevailed in lamps
and seats and flagged walks, hovering also overhead in the close
neighbourhood of a great replete community about to assist anew at the
removal of dish-covers.

"We've had, as it seems to me, such quite beautiful days together, that
I hope it won't come to you too much as a shock when I ask if you think
you could regard me with any satisfaction as a husband." As if he had
known she wouldn't, she of course couldn't, at all gracefully, and
whether or no, reply with a rush, he had said a little more--quite as he
had felt he must in thinking it out in advance. He had put the question
on which