I remember thinking that whatever happened, whatever price I had to pay,
I must stand upon the stage of that theatre and win. My lips were quite
dry. His great voice seemed to have faded into a whisper.

"'Your offer?' I repeated.

"'Yourself,' he answered gruffly."

There was a silence which seemed to Philip interminable. All the magic of
the place had passed away, its music seemed no longer to be singing
happiness into his heart. Then at last he realised that she was waiting
for him to speak.

"He wanted--to marry you?" he faltered.

"He had a wife already."

Splash! John was throwing stones into the lake, a pastime of which he was
getting a little tired. A huge thrush was thinking about commencing to
build his nest, and in the meantime sat upon a fallen log across the way
and sang about it. A little tree-climbing bird ran round and round the
trunk of the nearest elm, staring at them, every time he appeared, with
his tiny black eyes. A squirrel, almost overhead, who had long since come
to the conclusion that they were harmless, decided now that they had the
queerest manners of any two young people he had ever watched from his
leafy throne, and finally abandoned his position. Elizabeth had been
staring down the road ever since the last words had passed her lips. She
turned at last and looked at her companion. He was once more the refugee,
the half-starved man flying from horrors greater even than he had known.
She began to tremble.

"Philip!" she cried. "Say anything, but speak to me!"

Like a flash he seemed to pass from his own, almost the hermit's way of
looking out upon life from the old-fashioned standpoint of his inherent
puritanism, into a closer sympathy with those others, the men and women
of the world into which he had so lately entered, the men and women who
had welcomed him so warm-heartedly, human beings all of them, who lived
and loved with glad hearts and much kindliness. The contrast was absurd,
the story itself suddenly so reasonable. No other woman on tour would
have kept Sylvanus Power waiting for three years. Only Elizabeth could
have done that. It was such a human little problem. People didn't live in
the clouds. He wasn't fit for the clouds himself. Nevertheless, when he
tried to speak his throat was hard and dry, and at the second attempt he
began instead to laugh. She gripped his arm.

"Philip!" she exclaimed. "Be reasonable! Say what you like, but look and
behave like a human being.