“‘I’ll tell you all about that’ he answered.  ’I built it, I own it, and it will be opened just when you accept my offer and play in it.’

“It all seemed too amazing.  For a time I couldn’t speak coherently.  Then I remember thinking that whatever happened, whatever price I had to pay, I must stand upon the stage of that theatre and win.  My lips were quite dry.  His great voice seemed to have faded into a whisper.

“‘Your offer?’ I repeated.

“‘Yourself,’ he answered gruffly.”

There was a silence which seemed to Philip interminable.  All the magic of the place had passed away, its music seemed no longer to be singing happiness into his heart.  Then at last he realised that she was waiting for him to speak.

“He wanted—­to marry you?” he faltered.

“He had a wife already.”

Splash!  John was throwing stones into the lake, a pastime of which he was getting a little tired.  A huge thrush was thinking about commencing to build his nest, and in the meantime sat upon a fallen log across the way and sang about it.  A little tree-climbing bird ran round and round the trunk of the nearest elm, staring at them, every time he appeared, with his tiny black eyes.  A squirrel, almost overhead, who had long since come to the conclusion that they were harmless, decided now that they had the queerest manners of any two young people he had ever watched from his leafy throne, and finally abandoned his position.  Elizabeth had been staring down the road ever since the last words had passed her lips.  She turned at last and looked at her companion.  He was once more the refugee, the half-starved man flying from horrors greater even than he had known.  She began to tremble.

“Philip!” she cried.  “Say anything, but speak to me!”

Like a flash he seemed to pass from his own, almost the hermit’s way of looking out upon life from the old-fashioned standpoint of his inherent puritanism, into a closer sympathy with those others, the men and women of the world into which he had so lately entered, the men and women who had welcomed him so warm-heartedly, human beings all of them, who lived and loved with glad hearts and much kindliness.  The contrast was absurd, the story itself suddenly so reasonable.  No other woman on tour would have kept Sylvanus Power waiting for three years.  Only Elizabeth could have done that.  It was such a human little problem.  People didn’t live in the clouds.  He wasn’t fit for the clouds himself.  Nevertheless, when he tried to speak his throat was hard and dry, and at the second attempt he began instead to laugh.  She gripped his arm.

“Philip!” she exclaimed.  “Be reasonable!  Say what you like, but look and behave like a human being.  Don’t make that noise!” she almost shrieked.

He stopped at once.

“Forgive me,” he begged humbly.  “I can’t help it.  I seem to be playing hide and seek with myself.  You haven’t finished the story yet—­if there is anything more to tell me.”