“Yes,”—­I answered, slowly—­“I—­I like him—­very much.”

And the violet sky, with its round white moon, seemed to swing in a circle about me as I spoke—­knowing that the true answer of my heart was love, not liking!—­that love was the magnet drawing me irresistibly, despite my own endeavour, to something I could neither understand nor imagine.

“I’m glad of that,” said Mr. Harland—­“It would have worried me a little if you had taken a prejudice or felt any antipathy towards him.  I can see that Brayle hates him and has imbued Catherine with something of his own dislike.”

I was silent.

“He is, of course, an extraordinary man,” went on Mr. Harland—­“and he is bound to offend many and to please few.  He is not likely to escape the usual fate of unusual characters.  But I think—­indeed I may say I am sure—­his integrity is beyond question.  He has curious opinions about love and marriage—­almost as curious as the fixed ideas he holds concerning life and death.”

Something cold seemed to send a shiver through my blood—­was it some stray fragment of memory from the past that stirred me to a sense of pain?  I forced myself to speak.

“What are those opinions?” I asked, and looking up in the moonlight to my companion’s face I saw that it wore a puzzled expression—­ “Hardly conventional, I suppose?”

“Conventional!  Convention and Santoris are farther apart than the poles!  No—­he doesn’t fit into any accepted social code at all.  He looks upon marriage itself as a tacit acknowledgment of inconstancy in love, and declares that if the passion existed in its truest form between man and woman any sort of formal or legal tie would be needless,—­as love, if it be love, does not and cannot change.  But it is no use discussing such a matter with him.  The love that he believes in can only exist, if then, once in a thousand years!  Men and women marry for physical attraction, convenience, necessity or respectability,—­and the legal bond is necessary both for their sakes and the worldly welfare of the children born to them; but love which is physical and transcendental together,—­love that is to last through an imagined eternity of progress and fruition, this is a mere dream—­a chimera!—­and he feasts his brain upon it as though it were a nourishing fact.  However, one must have patience with him—­he is not like the rest of us.”

“No!” I murmured—­and then stood silently beside him watching the moonbeams ripple on the waters in wavy links of brightness.

“When you married,” I said, at last—­“did you not marry for love?”

He puffed at his cigar thoughtfully.