‘I can fly.  The world is wide.’

’Time slips.  Your youth is wasted.  If you escape the man, he will have triumphed in keeping you from me.  And I thirst for you; I look to you for aid and counsel; I want my mate.  You have not to be told how you inspire me?  I am really less than half myself without you.  If I am to do anything in the world, it must be with your aid, you beside me.  Our hands are joined:  one leap!  Do you not see that after . . . well, it cannot be friendship.  It imposes rather more on me than I can bear.  You are not the woman to trifle; nor I; Tony, the man for it with a woman like you.  You are my spring of wisdom.  You interdict me altogether—­can you?—­or we unite our fates, like these hands now.  Try to get yours away!’

Her effort ended in a pressure.  Resistance, nay, to hesitate at the joining of her life with his after her submission to what was a scorching fire in memory, though it was less than an embrace, accused her of worse than foolishness.

‘Well, then,’ said she, ’wait three days.  Deliberate.  Oh! try to know yourself, for your clear reason to guide you.  Let us be something better than the crowd abusing us, not simple creatures of impulse—­as we choose to call the animal.  What if we had to confess that we took to our heels the moment the idea struck us!  Three days.  We may then pretend to a philosophical resolve.  Then come to me:  or write to me.’

‘How long is it since the old Rovio morning, Tony?’

‘An age.’

‘Date my deliberations from that day.’

The thought of hers having to be dated possibly from an earlier day, robbed her of her summit of feminine isolation, and she trembled, chilled and flushed; she lost all anchorage.

‘So it must be to-morrow,’ said he, reading her closely, ’not later.  Better at once.  But women are not to be hurried.’

‘Oh! don’t class me, Percy, pray!  I think of you, not of myself.’

‘You suppose that in a day or two I might vary?’

She fixed her eyes on him, expressing certainty of his unalterable stedfastness.  The look allured.  It changed:  her head shook.  She held away and said:  ’No, leave me; leave me, dear, dear friend.  Percy, my dearest!  I will not “play the sex.”  I am yours if . . . if it is your wish.  It may as well be to-morrow.  Here I am useless; I cannot write, not screw a thought from my head.  I dread that “process of the Law” a second time.  To-morrow, if it must be.  But no impulses.  Fortune is blind; she may be kind to us.  The blindness of Fortune is her one merit, and fools accuse her of it, and they profit by it!  I fear we all of us have our turn of folly:  we throw the stake for good luck.  I hope my sin is not very great.  I know my position is desperate.  I feel a culprit.  But I am sure I have courage, perhaps brains to help.  At any rate, I may say this:  I bring no burden to my lover that he does not know of.’