“There is nearly half an hour before lunch,” he said.  “Can I convince you in that time, I wonder, that I’m not an absolute fool?”

Alicia turned and came back to her sofa.  She may have had a prevision of the need of support.  “I hardly think,” she said, drawing the long breath with which we try to subdue a tempest within, “that it would take so long.”  She looked with careful criticism at the violets in his buttonhole.

“I’ve had a supreme experience,” he said, “very strange and very lovely.  I am living in it, moving in it, speaking in it,” he added quickly, watching her face; “so don’t, for Heaven’s sake, touch it roughly.”

She lifted her hand in nervous, involuntary deprecation.  “Why should you suppose I would touch it roughly?” There was that in her voice which cried out that she would rather not touch it at all; but Lindsay, on the brink of his confidence, could not suppose it, did not hear it.  He knew her so well.

“A great many people will,” he said.  “I can’t bear the thought of their fingers.  That is one reason that brings me to you.”

She faced him fully at this; her eyelids quivered, but she looked straight at him.  It nerved her to be brought into his equation, even in the form which should finally be eliminated.  She contrived a smile.

“I believe you know already,” Lindsay cried.

“I have heard something.  Don’t be alarmed—­not from people, from Miss Howe.”

“Wonderful woman!  I haven’t told her.”

“Is that always necessary?  She has intuitions.  In this case,” Alicia went on, with immense courage, “I didn’t believe them.”

“Why?” he asked enjoyingly.  Anything to handle his delight—­he would even submit it to analysis.

She hesitated—­her business was in great waters, the next instant might engulf her.  “It’s so curiously unlike you,” she faltered.  “If she had been a duchess—­a very exquisite person, or somebody very clever—­remember I haven’t seen her.”

“You haven’t, so I must forgive you invidious comparisons.”  Lindsay visaged the words with a smile, but they had an articulated hardness.

Alicia raised her eyebrows.

“What do you expect one to imagine?” she asked, with quietness.

“A miracle,” he said sombrely.

“Ah, that’s difficult!”

There was silence for a moment between them, then she added perversely—­

“And, you know, faith is not what it was.”

Duff sat biting his lips.  Her dryness irritated him.  He was accustomed to find in her fields of delicately blooming enthusiasms, and running watercourses where his satisfactions were ever reflected.  Suddenly she seemed to emerge to her own consciousness, upon a summit from which she could look down upon the turmoil in herself and beyond it, to where he stood.

“Don’t make a mistake,” she said.  “Don’t.”  She thrust her hand for a fraction of an instant toward him, and then swiftly withdrew it, gathering herself together to meet what he might say.