“But I didn’t see any such thing,” he protested.  “I spoke because I couldn’t help it any longer.”

She laughed triumphantly.  “Of course you think so!  And that shows that you are only a man after all; in spite of your finessing.  But I am going to have the credit of it.  I knew that you were holding back because you were too proud, or thought you hadn’t the right, or something.  Weren’t you?” She startled him with the sudden vehemence of her challenge:  “If you pretend, that you weren’t I shall never forgive you!”

“But I was!  Of course I was.  I was afraid—­”

“Isn’t that what I said?” She triumphed over him with another laugh, and cowered a little closer to him, if that could be.

They were standing, without knowing how they had got to their feet; and now without any purpose of the kind, they began to stroll again among the garden paths, and to ask and to answer questions, which touched every point of their common history, and yet left it a mine of inexhaustible knowledge for all future time.  Out of the sweet and dear delight of this encyclopedian reserve two or three facts appeared with a present distinctness.  One of these was that Burnamy had regarded her refusal to be definite at Carlsbad as definite refusal, and had meant never to see her again, and certainly never to speak again of love to her.  Another point was that she had not resented his coming back that last night, but had been proud and happy in it as proof of his love, and had always meant somehow to let him know that she was torched by his trusting her enough to come back while he was still under that cloud with Mr. Stoller.  With further logic, purely of the heart, she acquitted him altogether of wrong in that affair, and alleged in proof, what Mr. Stoller had said of it to Mr. March.  Burnamy owned that he knew what Stoller had said, but even in his present condition he could not accept fully her reading of that obscure passage of his life.  He preferred to put the question by, and perhaps neither of them cared anything about it except as it related to the fact that they were now each other’s forever.

They agreed that they must write to Mr. and Mrs. March at once; or at least, Agatha said, as soon as she had spoken to her father.  At her mention of her father she was aware of a doubt, a fear, in Burnamy which expressed itself by scarcely more than a spiritual consciousness from his arm to the hands which she had clasped within it.  “He has always appreciated you,” she said courageously, “and I know he will see it in the right light.”

She probably meant no more than to affirm her faith in her own ability finally to bring her father to a just mind concerning it; but Burnamy accepted her assurance with buoyant hopefulness, and said he would see General Triscoe the first thing in the morning.

“No, I will see him,” she said, “I wish to see him first; he will expect it of me.  We had better go in, now,” she added, but neither made any motion for the present to do so.  On the contrary, they walked in the other direction, and it was an hour after Agatha declared their duty in the matter before they tried to fulfil it.