I am bound to you.  You need not fear that I shall take advantage of or misinterpret your confidence.”  Here he rose and stood before her, his dark handsome face bowed in proud humility.  “Miss Granger, I look upon it as an honour done to me by one whom henceforth I must reverence among all women.  The life you gave back to me, and the intelligence which directs it, are in duty bound to you, and I shall not forget the debt.”

Beatrice listened to his words, spoken in that deep and earnest voice, which in after years became so familiar to Her Majesty’s judges and to Parliament—­listened with a new sense of pleasure rising in her heart.  She was this man’s equal; what he could dare, she could dare; where he could climb, she could follow—­ay, and if need be, show the path, and she felt that he acknowledged it.  In his sight she was something more than a handsome girl to be admired and deferred to for her beauty’s sake.  He had placed her on another level—­one, perhaps, that few women would have wished to occupy.  But Beatrice was thankful to him.  It was the first taste of supremacy that she had ever known.

It is something to stir the proud heart of such a woman as Beatrice, in that moment when for the first time she feels herself a conqueror, victorious, not through the vulgar advantage of her sex, not by the submission of man’s coarser sense, but rather by the overbalancing weight of mind.

“Do you know,” she said, suddenly looking up, “you make me very proud,” and she stretched out her hand to him.

He took it, and, bending, touched it with his lips.  There was no possibility of misinterpreting the action, and though she coloured a little—­for, till then, no man had even kissed the tip of her finger—­she did not misinterpret it.  It was an act of homage, and that was all.

And so they sealed the compact of their perfect friendship for ever and a day.

Then came a moment’s silence.  It was Geoffrey who broke it.

“Miss Granger,” he said, “will you allow me to preach you a lecture, a very short one?”

“Go on,” she said.

“Very well.  Do not blame me if you don’t like it, and do not set me down as a prig, though I am going to tell you your faults as I read them in your own words.  You are proud and ambitious, and the cramped lines in which you are forced to live seem to strangle you.  You have suffered, and have not learned the lesson of suffering—­humility.  You have set yourself up against Fate, and Fate sweeps you along like spray upon the gale, yet you go unwilling.  In your impatience you have flown to learning for refuge, and it has completed your overthrow, for it has induced you to reject as non-existent all that you cannot understand.  Because your finite mind cannot search infinity, because no answer has come to all your prayers, because you see misery and cannot read its purpose, because you suffer and have not found rest, you have said there is naught but chance, and become an atheist, as many have done before you.  Is it not true?”