‘But you aren’t really going to——­’

‘No, of course not.’

She had no desire to discuss the tedious affair, because she was infallibly certain of his entire sympathy.  Explanations on her side, and assurances on his, were equally superfluous.

‘But won’t you come into the house?’ She invited him as a sort of afterthought.

‘Why?’ he demanded bluntly.

She hesitated before replying:  ’It will look so queer, us staying here like this.’  As soon as she had uttered the words she suspected that she had said something decisive and irretrievable.

He put his hands into the pockets of his overcoat and walked several times to and fro a few paces.  Then he stopped in front of her.

’I guess we are bound to look queer, you and I, some day.  So it may as well be now,’ he said.

It was in this exchange of sentences that their mutual passion became at length articulate.  A single discreet word spoken quickly, and she might even yet perhaps have withdrawn from the situation.  But she did not speak; she could not speak; and soon she knew that her own silence had bound her.  She yielded herself with poignant and magnificent joy to the profound drama which had been magically created by this apparently commonplace dialogue.  The climax had been achieved, and she was conscious of being lifted into a sublime exultation, and of being cut off from all else in the world save him.  She looked at him intently with a sadness that was the cloak of celestial rapture.  ’How courageous you are!’ her soft eyes said.  ‘I should never have dared.  What a man!’ It seemed to her that her heart would break under the strain of that ecstasy.  She had not imagined the possibility of such bliss.

‘Listen!’ he proceeded.  ’I ought to be in New York—­I oughtn’t to be here.  I must tell you.  Scarcely a fortnight ago, one afternoon while I was working in my office in Fourteenth Street, I had a feeling I would be bound to come over.  I said to myself the idea was preposterous.  But the next thing I knew I was arranging to come.  I couldn’t believe I was coming.  Not even when I had booked my berth and boarded the steamer, not even when the steamer was actually passing Sandy Hook, could I believe that I was really coming.  I said to myself I was mad.  I said to myself that no man in his senses could behave as I was behaving.  And when I got to Southampton I said I would go right back.  And yet I couldn’t help getting into the special for London.  And when I got to London I said I would act sensible and go back.  But I met young Burgess, and the next thing I knew I was at Euston.  And here I am pretending that it’s my new London branch that brings me over, and doing business I don’t want to do in Knype and Cauldon and Bursley.  And I’m killing myself—­yes, I am; I tell you I couldn’t stand much more—­and I wouldn’t be sure I wasn’t killing you.  Some folks would say the whole thing was perfectly dreadful,