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“Well”–and he resumed his circuit–“she doesn’t know anything that we know. But nothing,” he re-emphasised–“nothing whatever!”

“Well, can’t she do without that?”

“Evidently she can–and evidently she does, beautifully. But the question is whether I can!”

He had paused once more with his point–but she glared, poor Cornelia, with her wonder. “Surely if you know for yourself—-!”

“Ah, it doesn’t seem enough for me to know for myself! One wants a woman,” he argued–but still, in his prolonged tour, quite without his scowl–“to know for one, to know with one. That’s what you do now,” he candidly put to her.

It made her again gape. “Do you mean you want to marry me?”

He was so full of what he did mean, however, that he failed even to notice it. “She doesn’t in the least know, for instance, how old I am.”

“That’s because you’re so young!”

“Ah, there you are!”–and he turned off afresh and as if almost in disgust. It left her visibly perplexed–though even the perplexed Cornelia was still the exceedingly pointed; but he had come to her aid after another turn. “Remember, please, that I’m pretty well as old as you.”

She had all her point at least, while she bridled and blinked, for this. “You’re exactly a year and ten months older.”

It checked him there for delight. “You remember my birthday?”

She twinkled indeed like some far-off light of home. “I remember every one’s. It’s a little way I’ve always had–and that I’ve never lost.”

He looked at her accomplishment, across the room, as at some striking, some charming phenomenon. “Well, that’s the sort of thing I want!” All the ripe candour of his eyes confirmed it.

What could she do therefore, she seemed to ask him, but repeat her question of a moment before?–which indeed presently she made up her mind to. “Do you want to marry me?”

It had this time better success–if the term may be felt in any degree to apply. All his candour, or more of it at least, was in his slow, mild, kind, considering head-shake. “No, Cornelia–not to marry you.”

His discrimination was a wonder; but since she was clearly treating him now as if everything about him was, so she could as exquisitely meet it. “Not at least,” she convulsively smiled, “until you’ve honourably tried Mrs. Worthingham. Don’t you really mean to?” she gallantly insisted.

He waited again a little; then he brought out: “I’ll tell you presently.” He came back, and as by still another mere glance over the room, to what seemed to him so much nearer. “That table was old Twelfth-Street?”

“Everything here was.”

“Oh, the pure blessings! With you, ah, with you, I haven’t to wear a green shade.” And he had retained meanwhile his small photograph, which he again showed himself. “Didn’t we talk of Mary Cardew?”

“Why, do you remember it?” She marvelled to extravagance.

“You make me. You connect me with it. You connect it with we.” He liked to display to her this excellent use she thus had, the service she rendered. “There are so many connections–there will be so many. I feel how, with you, they must all come up again for me: in fact you’re bringing them out already, just while I look at you, as fast as ever you can. The fact that you knew every one–!” he went on; yet as if there were more in that too than he could quite trust himself about.

“Yes, I knew every one,” said Cornelia Rasch; but this time with perfect simplicity. “I knew, I imagine, more than you do–or more than you did.”

It kept him there, it made him wonder with his eyes on her. “Things about them–our people?”

“Our people. Ours only now.”

Ah, such an interest as he felt in this–taking from her while, so far from scowling, he almost gaped, all it might mean! “Ours indeed–and it’s awfully good they are; or that we’re still here for them! Nobody else is–nobody but you: not a cat!”