“Wait for me,” Laura said, to whom a Eurasian beggar made elaborate appeal, as they moved off.

“I guess you’ve got company to see you home,” Mrs. Sand called put, and they did not wait.  As Lindsay came closer, the East Indian paused in his tale of the unburied wife for whom he could not afford a coffin, and slipped away.

“The Ensign knows she oughtn’t to talk like that,” Laura said.  Lindsay marked with a surge of pleasure that she was flushed and seemed perturbed.

“What she said was quite true,” he ventured.

“But—­anybody would think——­”

“What would anybody think?  Shall we keep to this side of the road?  It’s quieter.  What would anybody think?”

“Oh, silly things.”  Laura threw up her head with a half-laugh.  “Things I needn’t mention.”

Lindsay was silent for an instant.  Then “Between us?” he asked, and she nodded.

Their side of the street, along the square, was nearly empty.  He found her hand and drew it through his arm.  “Would you mind so very much,” he said, “if those silly things were true?” He spoke as if to a child.  His passion was never more clearly a single object to him, divorced from all complicating and non-essential impressions of her.  “I would give all I possess to have it so,” he told her, catching at any old foolish phrase that would serve.

“I don’t believe you mean anything like all you say, Mr. Lindsay.”  Her head was bent and she kept her hand within his arm.  He seemed to be a circumstance that brought her reminiscences of how one behaved sentimentally toward a young man with whom there was no serious entanglement.  It is not surprising that he saw only one thing, walls going down before him, was aware only of something like invitation.  Existence narrowed itself to a single glowing point; as he looked it came so near that he bounded to meet it.

“Dear,” he said, “you can’t know—­there is no way of telling you—­what I mean.  I suppose every man feels the same thing about the woman he loves; but it seems to me that my life had never known the sun until I saw you.  I can’t explain to you how poor it was, and I won’t try; but I fancy God sends every one of us, if we know it, some one blessed chance, and He did more for me—­He lifted the veil of my stupidity and let me see it, passing by in its halo, trailing clouds of glory.  I don’t want to make you understand, though—­I want to make you promise.  I want to be absolutely sure from to-night that you’ll marry me.  Say that you’ll marry me—­say it before we get to the crossing.  Say it, Laura.”  She listened to his first words with a little half-controlled smile, then made as if she would withdraw her hand, but he held it with his own, and she heard him through, walking beside him formally in her bare feet, and looking carefully at the asphalt pavement as they do in Putney.

“I don’t object to your calling me by my given name,” she said when he had done, “but it can’t go any further than that, Mr. Lindsay, and you ought not to bring God into it—­indeed you ought not.  You are no son or servant of His—­you are among those whose very light is darkness, and how great is your darkness!”