“N—­o,” he said, as if awaking suddenly.  “Let us go outside.”

He caught up a fur cloak that was lying on a bench, and disregarding her laughing remonstrance that the thing did not belong to her, he put it round her and led her on to the terrace.  She looked up at him just as they were passing out of the stream of light, saw how set and hard his face was, how straight the lips and sombre the eyes, and her hand, as it rested lightly on his arm, quivered like a leaf in autumn.  When they had got into the open air, he threw back his head and drew a long breath.

“Yes; it was hot in there,” he said.

They walked slowly up and down for a minute, passing and repassing similar couples; then suddenly, as if the presence of others, the sound of their voices and laughter, jarred upon him, Stafford said: 

“Shall we go into the garden?  It is quiet there—­and I want to speak to you.”

“If you like,” she said, in a low voice, which she tried to make as languid as usual; but her heart began to beat fiercely and her lips trembled, and he might have heard her breath coming quickly had he not been absorbed in his own reflections.

They went down the steps and into the semi-darkness of the beautiful garden.  The silence was broken by the hum of the distant voices and the splashing of a fountain which reflected the electric light as the spray rose and fell with rhythmic regularity.  Stafford stopped at this and looked at the reflection of the stars in the shallow water.  Something in its simplicitude and the quiet, coming after the glitter and the noise of the ball-room, called up the remembrance of Herondale, and the quiet, love-laden hours he had spent there with Ida.  The thought went through him with a sharp pain, and he thrust it away from him as one thrusts away a threatening weakness.

“What is it you wanted to say to me?” asked Maude, not coldly or indifferently as she would have asked the question of another man, but softly, dreamily.

He walked on with her a few paces, looking straight before him as if he were trying to find words suitable for the answer; then he turned his face to her and looked at her steadily, though his head was burning and the plash of the fountain sounded like the roar of the sea in his ears.

“I wonder whether you could guess?” he said, as he thought of her father’s words, his assertion that Stafford was to be his son-in-law.  “I suppose you must.”

Her gaze was as steady as his, but her lips quivered slightly.

“I would rather you should tell me than that I should I guess,” she said in a low voice.  “I might be wrong.”

He was not in a condition to notice the significance of her last words, and he went on with a kind of desperation.

“I brought you here into the garden, Miss Falconer, to ask you if you’d be my wife.”

They had stopped just within the radius of an electric light, held aloft by a grinning satyr, and Stafford saw her face grow paler and paler in the seconds that followed the momentous question.  He could see her bosom heaving under the half-open fur cloak, felt her hand close for an instant on his arm.