That your knowing me has caused you? Pray don't be uncomplimentary; I
don't like it."

Pause again. "It is because of the gain that I feel the loss."

Here Gwendolen herself let a pause. She was thinking, "He is really
very ingenious. He never speaks stupidly." Her silence was so unusual
that it seemed the strongest of favorable answers, and he continued:

"The gain of knowing you makes me feel the time I lose in uncertainty.
Do _you_ like uncertainty?"

"I think I do, rather," said Gwendolen, suddenly beaming on him with a
playful smile. "There is more in it."

Grandcourt met her laughing eyes with a slow, steady look right into
them, which seemed like vision in the abstract, and then said, "Do you
mean more torment for me?"

There was something so strange to Gwendolen in this moment that she was
quite shaken out of her usual self-consciousness. Blushing and turning
away her eyes, she said, "No, that would make me sorry."

Grandcourt would have followed up this answer, which the change in her
manner made apparently decisive of her favorable intention; but he was
not in any way overcome so as to be unaware that they were now, within
sight of everybody, descending the space into Green Arbor, and
descending it at an ill-chosen point where it began to be
inconveniently steep. This was a reason for offering his hand in the
literal sense to help her; she took it, and they came down in silence,
much observed by those already on the level--among others by Mrs.
Arrowpoint, who happened to be standing with Mrs. Davilow. That lady
had now made up her mind that Grandcourt's merits were not such as
would have induced Catherine to accept him, Catherine having so high a
standard as to have refused Lord Slogan. Hence she looked at the tenant
of Diplow with dispassionate eyes.

"Mr. Grandcourt is not equal as a man to his uncle, Sir Hugo
Mallinger--too languid. To be sure, Mr. Grandcourt is a much younger
man, but I shouldn't wonder if Sir Hugo were to outlive him,
notwithstanding the difference of years. It is ill calculating on
successions," concluded Mrs. Arrowpoint, rather too loudly.

"It is indeed," said Mrs. Davilow, able to assent with quiet
cheerfulness, for she was so well satisfied with the actual situation
of affairs that her habitual melancholy in their general
unsatisfactoriness was altogether in abeyance.

I am not concerned to tell of the food that was eaten in that green
refectory, or even to dwell on the s