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And it seemed to Mr. Wycherley that he had gone divinely mad. “Don’t lie to me, Olivia. You are thinking there are yet a host of heiresses who would be glad to be a famous beau’s wife at however dear a cost. But don’t lie to me. Don’t even try to seem the airy and bedizened woman I have known so long. All that is over now. Death tapped us on the shoulder, and, if only for a moment, the masks were dropped. And life is changed now, oh, everything is changed! Then, come, my dear! let us be wise and very honest. Let us concede it is still possible for me to find another heiress, and for you to marry Remon; let us grant it the only outcome of our common-sense! and for all that, laugh, and fling away the pottage, and be more wise than reason.”

She irresolutely said: “I cannot. Matters are altered now. It would be madness—-“

“It would undoubtedly be madness,” Mr. Wycherley assented. “But then I am so tired of being rational! Oh, Olivia,” this former arbiter of taste absurdly babbled, “if I lose you now it is forever! and there is no health in me save when I am with you. Then alone I wish to do praiseworthy things, to be all which the boy we know of should have grown to. . . . See how profoundly shameless I am become when, with such an audience, I take refuge in the pitiful base argument of my own weakness! But, my dear, I want you so that nothing else in the world means anything to me. I want you! and all my life I have wanted you.”

“Boy, boy—-!” she answered, and her fine hands had come to Wycherley, as white birds flutter homeward. But even then she had to deliberate the matter–since the habits of many years are not put aside like outworn gloves,–and for innumerable centuries, it seemed to him, her foot tapped on that wetted ledge.

Presently her lashes lifted. “I suppose it would be lacking in reverence to keep a clergyman waiting longer than was absolutely necessary?” she hazarded.