am sure you must have said already on
yours. If there be now, or ever shall be, anything we can do for our
guest, anything we can give that he would value, not in requital, but
in memory of what he has done for us--whatever it should cost us,
though he should ask the most precious thing we possess, it will be
our pride and pleasure--the greatest pleasure he can afford us--to
grant it."

The time and the surroundings were not perhaps exactly suitable to the
utterance of the wish suggested by these words; but I knew so little
what might be in store for me, and understood so well the difficulty
and uncertainty of finding future opportunities of intercourse with
the ladies at least of the family, that I dared not lose the present.
I spoke at once upon the impulse of the moment, with a sense of
reckless desperation not unlike that with which an artillerist fires
the train whose explosion may win for him the obsidional wreath or
blow him into atoms. "You and my host," I said, "have one treasure
that I have learned to covet, but it is exactly the most precious
thing you possess, and one which it would be presumptuous to ask as
reward; even had I not owed to Esmo the life I perilled for Eveena,
and if I had acted from choice and freely, instead of doing only what
only the vilest of cowards could have failed to attempt. In asking it
indeed, I feel that I cancel whatever claim your extravagant estimate
of that act can possibly ascribe to me."

"We don't waste words," answered Esmo, "in saying what we don't mean,
and I confirm fully what my wife has said. There is nothing we possess
that we shall not delight to give as token of regard and in
remembrance of this day to the saviour of our child."

"If," I said, "I find a neighbour's purse containing half his fortune,
and return it to him, he may offer me what reward I ask, but would
hardly think it reasonable if I asked for the purse and its contents.
But you have only one thing I care to possess--that which I have, by
God's help, been enabled to save to-day. If I must ask a gift, give me
Eveena herself."

Utilitarianism has extinguished in Mars the use of compliment and
circumlocution; and until I concluded, their looks of mild perplexity
showed that neither Zulve nor her husband caught my purpose. I
fancied--for, not daring to look them in the face, I had turned my
downcast glance on Eveena--that she had perhaps somewhat sooner
divined the object of my thoughts. However, a si