ed, "with the sun rising and the day still
freshly beginning that you should go or that I should go. I've wanted to
meet you like this and talk about things,--ten thousand times. And as
for me Stephen I _won't_ go. And I won't let you go if I can help it.
Not this morning, anyhow. No. Go later in the day if you will, and let
us two take this one talk that God Himself has given us. We've not
planned it. It's His doing, not ours."

I sat, yielding. "I am not so sure of God's participation," I said. "But
I know I am very tired, and glad to be with you. I can't tell you how
glad. So glad---- I think I should weep if I tried to say it...."

"Three, four, five hours perhaps--even if people know. Is it so much
worse than thirty minutes? We've broken the rules already; we've been
flung together; it's not our doing, Stephen. A little while longer--adds
so little to the offence and means to us----"

"Yes," I said, "but--if Justin knows?"

"He won't."

"Your companion?"

There was the briefest moment of reflection. "She's discretion itself,"
she said.

"Still----"

"If he's going to know the harm is done. We may as well be hung for a
sheep as a lamb. And he won't know. No one will know."

"The people here."

"Nobody's here. Not a soul who matters. I doubt if they know my name....
No one ever talks to me."

I sat in the bright sunshine, profoundly enervated and quite convinced,
but still maintaining out of mere indolence a show of hesitation....

"You take the good things God sends you, Stephen--as I do. You stay and
talk with me now, before the curtain falls again. We've tired of
letters. You stay and talk to me.

"Here we are, Stephen, and it's the one chance that is ever likely to
come to us in all our lives. We'll keep the point of honor; and you
shall go to-day. But don't let's drive the point of honor into the
quick. Go easy Stephen, old friend.... My dear, my dear! What has
happened to you? Have you forgotten? Of course! Is it possible for you
to go, mute, with so much that we can say.... And these mountains and
this sunlight!..."

I looked up to see her with her elbows on the table and her hands
clasped under her chin; that face close to mine, her dear blue eyes
watching me and her lips a little apart.

No other human being has ever had that effect upon me, so that I seem to
feel the life and stir in that other body more than I feel my own.

Sec. 3

From the moment when I confessed my decision to st