"Do you know any man who is going to the devil?"
"Do you?" she asked, letting herself go swinging out upon a tide of intimacy she had never dreamed of risking--nor had she the slightest idea whither the current would carry her.
They had stopped on the lawn, ankle deep in wet grass, the stars overhead sparkling magnificently, and in their ears the outcrash of the sea.
"You mean me," he concluded.
"Do I?"
He looked up into the lovely face; her eyes were very sweet, very clear--clear with excitement--but very friendly.
"Let us sit here on the steps a little while, will you?" she asked.
So he found a place beside her, one step lower, and she leaned forward, elbows on knees, rounded white chin in her palms, the starlight giving her bare arms and shoulders a marble lustre and tinting her eyes a deeper amethyst.
And now, innocently untethered, mission and all, she laid her heart quite bare--one chapter of it. And, like other women-errant who believe in the influence of their sex individually and collectively, she began wrong by telling him of her engagement--perhaps to emphasise her pure disinterestedness in a crusade for principle only. Which naturally dampened in him any nascent enthusiasm for being ministered to, and so preoccupied him that he turned deaf ears to some very sweet platitudes which might otherwise have impressed him as discoveries in philosophy.
Officially her creed was the fashionable one in town; privately she had her own religion, lacking some details truly enough, but shaped upon youthful notions of right and wrong. As she had not read very widely, she supposed that she had discovered this religion for herself; she was not aware that everybody else had passed that way--it being the first immature moult in young people after rejecting dogma.
And the ripened fruit of all this philosophy she helpfully dispensed for Siward's benefit as bearing directly on his case.
Had he not been immersed in the unexpected proposition of her impending matrimony, he might have been impressed, for the spell of her beauty counted something, and besides, he had recently formulated for himself a code of ethics, tinctured with Omar, and slightly resembling her own discoveries in that dog-eared science.
So it was, when she was most eloquent, most earnestly inspired--nay in the very middle of a plea for sweetness and light and simple living, that his reasonings found voice in the material comment: "I never imagined you were engaged!"
"Is that what you have been thinking about?" she asked, innocently astonished.
"Yes. Why not? I never for one instant supposed--"
"But, Mr. Siward, why should you have concerned yourself with supposing anything? Why indulge in any speculation of that sort about me?"