'That sounds perilously like love-making.'
''Tis love indeed.'
'Well, love is natural to men, I suppose,' rejoined the young lady. 'But you must love within bounds; or you will be enervated, and cease to be useful as a heavy arm of the service.'
'My dear Miss Power, your didactic and respectable rules won't do for me. If you expect straws to stop currents, you are sadly mistaken! But no--let matters be: I am a happy contented mortal at present, say what you will.... You don't ask why? Perhaps you know. It is because all I care for in the world is near me, and that I shall never be more than a hundred yards from her as long as the present arrangement continues.'
'We are in a cathedral, remember, Captain De Stancy, and should not keep up a secular conversation.'
'If I had never said worse in a cathedral than what I have said here, I should be content to meet my eternal judge without absolution. Your uncle asked me this morning how I liked you.'
'Well, there was no harm in that.'
'How I like you! Harm, no; but you should have seen how silly I looked. Fancy the inadequacy of the expression when my whole sense is absorbed by you.'
'Men allow themselves to be made ridiculous by their own feelings in an inconceivable way.'
'True, I am a fool; but forgive me,' he rejoined, observing her gaze, which wandered critically from roof to clerestory, and then to the pillars, without once lighting on him. 'Don't mind saying Yes.--You look at this thing and that thing, but you never look at me, though I stand here and see nothing but you.'
'There, the clock is striking--and the cock crows. Please go across to the transept and tell them to come out this way.'
De Stancy went. When he had gone a few steps he turned his head. She had at last ceased to study the architecture, and was looking at him. Perhaps his words had struck her, for it seemed at that moment as if he read in her bright eyes a genuine interest in him and his fortunes.