dney drew
further ahead, and Denham kept, if that is the right expression for an
involuntary action, one filament of his mind upon them, while with the
rest of his intelligence he sought to understand what Sandys was saying.

As they passed through the courts thus talking, Sandys laid the tip of
his stick upon one of the stones forming a time-worn arch, and struck
it meditatively two or three times in order to illustrate something very
obscure about the complex nature of one's apprehension of facts. During
the pause which this necessitated, Katharine and Rodney turned the
corner and disappeared. For a moment Denham stopped involuntarily in his
sentence, and continued it with a sense of having lost something.

Unconscious that they were observed, Katharine and Rodney had come out
on the Embankment. When they had crossed the road, Rodney slapped his
hand upon the stone parapet above the river and exclaimed:

"I promise I won't say another word about it, Katharine! But do stop a
minute and look at the moon upon the water."

Katharine paused, looked up and down the river, and snuffed the air.

"I'm sure one can smell the sea, with the wind blowing this way," she
said.

They stood silent for a few moments while the river shifted in its bed,
and the silver and red lights which were laid upon it were torn by the
current and joined together again. Very far off up the river a steamer
hooted with its hollow voice of unspeakable melancholy, as if from the
heart of lonely mist-shrouded voyagings.

"Ah!" Rodney cried, striking his hand once more upon the balustrade,
"why can't one say how beautiful it all is? Why am I condemned for
ever, Katharine, to feel what I can't express? And the things I can give
there's no use in my giving. Trust me, Katharine," he added hastily,
"I won't speak of it again. But in the presence of beauty--look at
the iridescence round the moon!--one feels--one feels--Perhaps if you
married me--I'm half a poet, you see, and I can't pretend not to feel
what I do feel. If I could write--ah, that would be another matter. I
shouldn't bother you to marry me then, Katharine."

He spoke these disconnected sentences rather abruptly, with his eyes
alternately upon the moon and upon the stream.

"But for me I suppose you would recommend marriage?" said Katharine,
with her eyes fixed on the moon.

"Certainly I should. Not for you only, but for all women. Why, you're
nothing at all without it; you're only half