“Oh—­”

“Marcella,” he said solemnly.  “You really mean it?  You’re not going to let me down?  Violet let me down—­and I’m always letting people down.  I can’t trust people now.”

“Supposing I’d wanted to marry Violet, I’d have married her,” she said, her brow puckered.  “And I wouldn’t be let down.”

“No, I suppose you wouldn’t,” he said, slowly.

“Louis—­” she began again, breathlessly, and then let the words out in a torrent.  “Louis, I know I’ve got to marry you.  Do you understand that?  It’s—­it’s inevitable.  It was from the minute I met you.  You’ll never understand that, not being a Kelt, though.  I know it quite well.  And I’m afraid I’m going to shy at it.  And, for my sake as well as yours, I’ve not to shy.  Louis, will you grab me tight?”

He stared at her, utterly at a loss.  He did not begin to grasp what she meant.  To him she was just “fickle woman” always changing her mind.  He had, all his life, generalized about woman; he had never known a woman who was not rather vapid, rather brainless; he had the same idea of women as Professor Kraill had ventilated in his lectures—­that they were the vehicles of the race, living for the race but getting all the fun they could out of the preliminary canter, since the race was a rather strenuous, rather joyless thing for them.  And it was in men they found the fun.  Yet here was Marcella, who was quite different from anything feminine he had ever seen or imagined, suddenly appealing to him not to let her be fickle.  Immediately he felt very manly, very responsible.  Then he laughed.

“Quis custodiet ipsos custodies?” he said, looking into her eyes.

“Father often said that.  What does it mean?”

“Who’ll look after the looker-after?” he said, with a laugh.  “Here’s me begging you to look after me and save me from going to hell.  And here’s you asking me to grab you for fear you’ll change your mind.  I wonder which is going to have the hardest job?”

She looked at him and said hurriedly: 

“Louis, couldn’t we be married now—­to-night?  In Scotland we do, you know—­just in any room without church or anything.”

“But—­I wish we could!” he said, his hands beginning to shake.

“I want to be sure—­”

“I’m afraid we can’t,” he said, anxiously.  “I’m afraid we’ll have to wait till we get to Sydney.”

Unexpectedly memory brought back the thought that when he became engaged to Violet he had kissed her and held her in his arms; he remembered it very well.  To get to the necessary pitch of courage he had had to get very drunk on champagne, for champagne always made him in a generally kissing and love-making mood that involved him often with barmaids and street ladies.  He knew very well that he would never have thought of making love to Marcella:  if she had not taken things into her own hands, they would have parted in Sydney, necessary as he considered her to his well