This characterisation came from her as they walked away—­walked together, in the waning afternoon, back to the breezy sea and the bustling front, back to the nimble and the flutter and the shining shops that sharpened the grin of solicitation on the mask of night.  They were walking thus, as he felt, nearer and nearer to where he should see his ships burn, and it was meanwhile for him quite as if this red glow would impart, at the harmonious hour, a lurid grandeur to his good faith.  It was meanwhile too a sign of the kind of sensibility often playing up in him that—­ fabulous as this truth may sound—­he found a sentimental link, an obligation of delicacy, or perhaps even one of the penalties of its opposite, in his having exposed her to the north light, the quite properly hard business-light, of the room in which they had been alone with the treasure and its master.  She had listened to the name of the sum he was capable of looking in the face.  Given the relation of intimacy with him she had already, beyond all retractation, accepted, the stir of the air produced at the other place by that high figure struck him as a thing that, from the moment she had exclaimed or protested as little as he himself had apologised, left him but one thing more to do.  A man of decent feeling didn’t thrust his money, a huge lump of it, in such a way, under a poor girl’s nose—­a girl whose poverty was, after a fashion, the very basis of her enjoyment of his hospitality—­ without seeing, logically, a responsibility attached.  And this was to remain none the less true for the fact that twenty minutes later, after he had applied his torch, applied it with a sign or two of insistence, what might definitely result failed to be immediately clear.  He had spoken—­spoken as they sat together on the out-of-the-way bench observed during one of their walks and kept for the previous quarter of the present hour well in his memory’s eye; the particular spot to which, between intense pauses and intenser advances, he had all the while consistently led her.  Below the great consolidated cliff, well on to where the city of stucco sat most architecturally perched, with the rumbling beach and the rising tide and the freshening stars in front and above, the safe sense of the whole place yet prevailed in lamps and seats and flagged walks, hovering also overhead in the close neighbourhood of a great replete community about to assist anew at the removal of dish-covers.

“We’ve had, as it seems to me, such quite beautiful days together, that I hope it won’t come to you too much as a shock when I ask if you think you could regard me with any satisfaction as a husband.”  As if he had known she wouldn’t, she of course couldn’t, at all gracefully, and whether or no, reply with a rush, he had said a little more—­quite as he had felt he must in thinking it out in advance.  He had put the question on which there was no going back and which represented thereby the sacrifice of his vessels, and what he