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Meanwhile, Fitz and the beauty were strolling along the Cliff Walk in the bright sunshine, with the cool Atlantic breeze in their faces, between lawns and gardens on the one side and dancing blue waves upon the other. Fitz looked pale and careworn. But Eve looked ecstatic. This was because poor Fitz, on the one hand, was still in the misery of doubt and uncertainty, and because Eve, on the other, had suddenly made up her mind and knew almost exactly what was going to happen.

The Cliff Walk belongs to the public, and here and there meanders irritatingly over some very exclusive millionaire’s front lawn. A few such, unable to endure the sight of strangers, have caused this walk, where it crosses their properties, to be sunk so that from the windows of their houses neither the walk itself nor persons walking upon it can be seen.

Fitz and the beauty were approaching one of these “ha-ha’s” into which the path dipped steeply and from which it rose steeply upon the farther side. On the left was a blank wall of granite blocks, on the right only a few thousand miles of blind ocean. It may have been a distant view of this particular “ha-ha” that had made up Eve’s mind for her, for she had a strong dramatic sense. Or it may have been that her heart alone had made up her mind, and that the secluded depths of the “ha-ha” had nothing to do with the matter.

“Jim,” she said as they began to descend into the place, “life’s only a moment out of eternity, isn’t it?”

“Only a moment, Eve,” he said, “a little longer for some than for others.”

“If it’s only a moment,” she said as they reached the bottom of the decline, and could only be seen by the blind granite wall and the blind ocean, “I think it ought to be complete.”

“Why, Eve!” he said, his voice breaking and choking. “Honestly?… My Eve!… Mine!… Look at me…. Is it true?… Are you sure?… Why, she’s sure!… My darling’s sure … all sure.”

* * * * *

Later he said: “And you don’t care about money, and you’ve got the biggest, sweetest heart in all the world. And it’s mine, and mine’s yours.”

“I can’t seem to see anything in any direction,” she said, “beyond you.”

* * * * *

Later they had to separate, only to meet again at a dinner. Before they went in they had a word together in a corner.

“I told you,” said Fitz, “that my father would understand, and you said he wouldn’t. But he did; his answer came while I was dressing. I telegraphed: ‘I have seen the world,’ and the answer was: ‘Put a fence around it.'”

She smiled with delight.

“Eve,” he said, “everybody knows that you’ve taken me. It’s in our faces, I suppose. And they are saying that you are a goose to throw yourself away on a bank clerk.”

“Do you think I care?” she said.

“I know you don’t,” he said, “but I can’t help thanking you for holding your head so high and looking so happy and so proud.”

“Wouldn’t you be proud,” she said, “to have been brought up to think that you had no heart, and then to find that, in spite of everything, you had one that could jump and thump, and love and long, and make poverty look like paradise?”

“I know what you mean, a little,” he said. “Your mother tried to make you into an Article; my mother tried to make an Englishman of me. And instead, you turned into an angel, and I was never anything but a spread eagle.”