"Ah do let me try myself! I assure you I see my way--so don't
spoil it: wait for me and give me time. Dear man," Kate said, "only
believe in me, and it will be beautiful."

He hadn't come back to hear her talk of his believing in her as if he
didn't; but he had come back--and it all was upon him now--to seize her
with a sudden intensity that her manner of pleading with him had made,
as happily appeared, irresistible. He laid strong hands upon her to
say, almost in anger, "Do you love me, love me, love me?" and she
closed her eyes as with the sense that he might strike her but that she
could gratefully take it. Her surrender was her response, her response
her surrender; and, though scarce hearing what she said, he so profited
by these things that it could for the time be ever so intimately
appreciable to him that he was keeping her. The long embrace in which
they held each other was the rout of evasion, and he took from it the
certitude that what she had from him was real to her. It was stronger
than an uttered vow, and the name he was to give it in afterthought was
that she had been sublimely sincere. _That_ was all he asked--sincerity
making a basis that would bear almost anything. This settled so much,
and settled it so thoroughly, that there was nothing left to ask her to
swear to. Oaths and vows apart, now they could talk. It seemed in fact
only now that their questions were put on the table. He had taken up
more expressly at the end of five minutes her plea for her own plan,
and it was marked that the difference made by the passage just enacted
was a difference in favour of her choice of means. Means had somehow
suddenly become a detail--her province and her care; it had grown more
consistently vivid that her intelligence was one with her passion. "I
certainly don't want," he said--and he could say it with a smile of
indulgence--"to be all the while bringing it up that I don't trust you."

"I should hope not! What do you think I want to do?"

He had really at this to make out a little what he thought, and the
first thing that put itself in evidence was of course the oddity, after
all, of their game, to which he could but frankly allude. "We're doing,
at the best, in trying to temporise in so special a way, a thing most
people would call us fools for." But his visit passed, all the same,
without his again attempting to make "just as he was" serve. He had no
more money just as he was than he had had just as he had b