hout any fear that her companion would think
her trivial. Indeed, whether it was due to the warmth of the room or to
the good roast beef, or whether Ralph had achieved the process which is
called making up one's mind, certainly he had given up testing the good
sense, the independent character, the intelligence shown in her remarks.
He had been building one of those piles of thought, as ramshackle and
fantastic as a Chinese pagoda, half from words let fall by gentlemen in
gaiters, half from the litter in his own mind, about duck shooting and
legal history, about the Roman occupation of Lincoln and the relations
of country gentlemen with their wives, when, from all this disconnected
rambling, there suddenly formed itself in his mind the idea that he
would ask Mary to marry him. The idea was so spontaneous that it seemed
to shape itself of its own accord before his eyes. It was then that he
turned round and made use of his old, instinctive phrase:

"Well, Mary--?"

As it presented itself to him at first, the idea was so new and
interesting that he was half inclined to address it, without more ado,
to Mary herself. His natural instinct to divide his thoughts carefully
into two different classes before he expressed them to her prevailed.
But as he watched her looking out of the window and describing the old
lady, the woman with the perambulator, the bailiff and the dissenting
minister, his eyes filled involuntarily with tears. He would have liked
to lay his head on her shoulder and sob, while she parted his hair with
her fingers and soothed him and said:

"There, there. Don't cry! Tell me why you're crying--"; and they would
clasp each other tight, and her arms would hold him like his mother's.
He felt that he was very lonely, and that he was afraid of the other
people in the room.

"How damnable this all is!" he exclaimed abruptly.

"What are you talking about?" she replied, rather vaguely, still looking
out of the window.

He resented this divided attention more than, perhaps, he knew, and he
thought how Mary would soon be on her way to America.

"Mary," he said, "I want to talk to you. Haven't we nearly done? Why
don't they take away these plates?"

Mary felt his agitation without looking at him; she felt convinced that
she knew what it was that he wished to say to her.

"They'll come all in good time," she said; and felt it necessary to
display her extreme calmness by lifting a salt-cellar and sweeping up a
li