A sound rose to her ears from the gravel path below her window—­the sound of a slight involuntary movement.  Stella drew sharply back.  Then she leaned out again and called softly: 

“Dick.”

He was standing a little to the left of the window out of reach of the light which streamed out upon the darkness from the room behind her.  He moved forward now.

“Oh, Dick, why are you waiting?”

“I wanted to be sure that all was right, Stella.”

“I gave you my word, Dick,” she whispered and she wished him good-night again and waited till the sound of his footsteps had altogether died away.  He went back to the house and found Thresk still at work in the library.

“I don’t want to interrupt you,” he said, “but I must thank you again.  I can’t tell you what I owe you.  She’s pretty wonderful, isn’t she?  I feel coarse beside her, I tell you.  I couldn’t talk like this to any one else, but you’re so sympathetic.”

Henry Thresk had responded with nothing more than a grunt.  He sat slashing at his brief with a blue pencil, all the while that Dick Hazlewood was speaking, and wishing that he would go to bed.  Dick however was unabashed.

“Did you ever see a woman look so well in a blue frock?  Or in a black one either?  There’s a sort of painted thing she wears sometimes too.  Well, perhaps I had better go to bed.”

“I think it would be wise,” said Thresk.

Young Hazlewood went over to the table in the corner and lit his candle.

“You’ll shut that window before you go to bed, won’t you?”

“Yes.”

Hazlewood filled for himself a glass of barley-water and drank it, contemplating Henry Thresk over the rim.  Then he went back to him, carrying his candle in his hand.

“Why don’t you get married, Mr. Thresk?” he asked.  “You ought to, you know.  Men run to seed so if they don’t.”

“Thank you,” said Thresk.

The tone was not cordial, but mere words were an invitation to Dick Hazlewood at this moment.  He sat down and placed his lighted candle on the table between Thresk and himself.

“I am thirty-four years old,” he said, and Thresk interposed without glancing up from his foolscap: 

“From your style of conversation I find that very difficult to believe, Captain Hazlewood.”

“I have wasted thirty-four complete years of twelve months each,” continued the ecstatic Captain, who appeared to think that on the very day of his birth he would have recognised his soul’s mate.  “Just jogging along with the world, a miracle about one and not half an eye to perceive it.  You know.”

“No, I don’t,” Thresk observed.  He lifted the candle and held it out to Dick.  Dick got up and took it.

“Thank you,” he said.  “That was very kind of you.  I told you—­didn’t I?—­how sympathetic I thought you.”

Thresk was not proof against his companion’s pertinacity.  He broke into a laugh.  “Are you going to bed?” he pleaded, and Dick Hazlewood replied, “Yes I am.”  Suddenly his tone changed.