“There are a thousand things I want to talk about to you,” she said.  “After we have parted to-morrow I shall begin to think of them.  But now—­every rational thing seems dissolved in this moonlight....”

Presently she made an effort to restore the intellectual dignity of their relationship.

“I suppose I ought to be more concerned tonight about the work I have to do in the world and anxious for you to tell me this and that, but indeed I am not concerned at all about it.  I seem to have it in outline all perfectly clear.  I mean to play a man’s part in the world just as my father wants me to do.  I mean to win his confidence and work with him—­like a partner.  Then some day I shall be a power in the world of fuel.  And at the same time I must watch and read and think and learn how to be the servant of the world....  We two have to live like trusted servants who have been made guardians of a helpless minor.  We have to put things in order and keep them in order against the time when Man—­Man whom we call in America the Common Man—­can take hold of his world—­”

“And release his servants,” said Sir Richmond.

“All that is perfectly clear in my mind.  That is what I am going to live for; that is what I have to do.”

She stopped abruptly.  “All that is about as interesting to-night—­in comparison with the touch of your dear fingers—­as next month’s railway time-table.”

But later she found a topic that could hold their attention for a time.

“We have never said a word about religion,” she said.

Sir Richmond paused for a moment.  “I am a godless man,” he said.  “The stars and space and time overwhelm my imagination.  I cannot imagine anything above or beyond them.”

She thought that over.  “But there are divine things,” she said.

“You are divine....  I’m not talking lovers’ nonsense,” he hastened to add.  “I mean that there is something about human beings—­not just the everyday stuff of them, but something that appears intermittently—­as though a light shone through something translucent.  If I believe in any divinity at all it is a divinity revealed to me by other people—­And even by myself in my own heart.

“I’m never surprised at the badness of human beings,” said Sir Richmond; “seeing how they have come about and what they are; but I have been surprised time after time by fine things....  Often in people I disliked or thought little of....  I can understand that I find you full of divine quality, because I am in love with you and all alive to you.  Necessarily I keep on discovering loveliness in you.  But I have seen divine things in dear old Martineau, for example.  A vain man, fussy, timid—­and yet filled with a passion for truth, ready to make great sacrifices and to toil tremendously for that.  And in those men I am always cursing, my Committee, it is astonishing at times to discover what streaks of goodness even the really bad men can show....