Honora laughed.  The idea of Peter wishing such a house was indeed ridiculous.  Then she became grave again.

“There are times when you seem to forget that I have at last grown up, Peter.  You never will talk over serious things with me.”

“What are serious things?” asked Peter.

“Well,” said Honora vaguely, “ambitions, and what one is going to make of themselves in life.  And then you make fun of me by saying you want Mr. Dwyer’s house.”  She laughed again.  “I can’t imagine you in that house!”

“Why not?” he asked, stopping beside the pond and thrusting his hands in his pockets.  He looked very solemn, but she knew he was smiling inwardly.

“Why—­because I can’t,” she said, and hesitated.  The question had forced her to think about Peter.  “I can’t imagine you living all alone in all that luxury.  It isn’t like you.”

“Why I all alone?” asked Peter.

“Don’t—­Don’t be ridiculous,” she said; “you wouldn’t build a house like that, even if you were twice as rich as Mr. Dwyer.  You know you wouldn’t.  And you’re not the marrying kind,” she added, with the superior knowledge of eighteen.

“I’m waiting for you, Honora,” he announced.

“You know I love you, Peter,”—­so she tempered her reply, for Honora’s feelings were tender.  What man, even Peter, would not have married her if he could?  Of course he was in earnest, despite his bantering tone, “but I never could—­marry you.”

“Not even if I were to offer you a house like Mr. Dwyer’s?” he said.  A remark which betrayed—­although not to her—­his knowledge of certain earthly strains in his goddess.

The colours faded from the water, and it blackened.

As they walked on side by side in the twilight, a consciousness of repressed masculine force, of reserve power, which she had never before felt about Peter Erwin, invaded her; and she was seized with a strange uneasiness.  Ridiculous was the thought (which she lost no time in rejecting) that pointed out the true road to happiness in marrying such a man as he.  In the gathering darkness she slipped her hand through his arm.

“I wish I could marry you, Peter,” she said.

He was fain to take what comfort he could from this expression of good-will.  If he was not the Prince Charming of her dreams, she would have liked him to be.  A little reflection on his part ought to have shown him the absurdity of the Prince Charming having been there all the time, and in ready-made clothes.  And he, too, may have had dreams.  We are not concerned with them.

............................

If we listen to the still, small voice of realism, intense longing is always followed by disappointment.  Nothing should have happened that summer, and Providence should not have come disguised as the postman.  It was a sultry day in early September-which is to say that it was comparatively cool—­a blue day, with occasional great drops of rain spattering on the brick walk.  And Honora was reclining on the hall sofa, reading about Mr. Ibbetson and his duchess, when she perceived the postman’s grey uniform and smiling face on the far side of the screen door.  He greeted her cordially, and gave her a single letter for Aunt Mary, and she carried it unsuspectingly upstairs.