Diana Duke seemed inexplicably irritated at the abrupt entrance and utterance of the other girl.

“Well,” she said shortly, “I suppose Miss Gray can decline him if she doesn’t want to marry him.”

“But she DOES want to marry him!” cried Rosamund in exasperation. “She’s a wild, wicked fool, and I won’t be parted from her.”

“Perhaps,” said Diana icily, “but I really don’t see what we can do.”

“But the man’s balmy, Diana,” reasoned her friend angrily. “I can’t let my nice governess marry a man that’s balmy! You or somebody MUST stop it!–Mr. Inglewood, you’re a man; go and tell them they simply can’t.”

“Unfortunately, it seems to me they simply can,” said Inglewood, with a depressed air. “I have far less right of intervention than Miss Duke, besides having, of course, far less moral force than she.”

“You haven’t either of you got much,” cried Rosamund, the last stays of her formidable temper giving way; “I think I’ll go somewhere else for a little sense and pluck. I think I know some one who will help me more than you do, at any rate... he’s a cantankerous beast, but he’s a man, and has a mind, and knows it...” And she flung out into the garden, with cheeks aflame, and the parasol whirling like a Catherine wheel.

She found Michael Moon standing under the garden tree, looking over the hedge; hunched like a bird of prey, with his large pipe hanging down his long blue chin. The very hardness of his expression pleased her, after the nonsense of the new engagement and the shilly-shallying of her other friends.

“I am sorry I was cross, Mr. Moon,” she said frankly. “I hated you for being a cynic; but I’ve been well punished, for I want a cynic just now. I’ve had my fill of sentiment–I’m fed up with it. The world’s gone mad, Mr. Moon–all except the cynics, I think. That maniac Smith wants to marry my old friend Mary, and she– and she–doesn’t seem to mind.”

Seeing his attentive face still undisturbedly smoking, she added smartly, “I’m not joking; that’s Mr. Smith’s cab outside. He swears he’ll take her off now to his aunt’s, and go for a special licence. Do give me some practical advice, Mr. Moon.”

Mr. Moon took his pipe out of his mouth, held it in his hand for an instant reflectively, and then tossed it to the other side of the garden. “My practical advice to you is this,” he said: “Let him go for his special licence, and ask him to get another one for you and me.”

“Is that one of your jokes?” asked the young lady. “Do say what you really mean.”

“I mean that Innocent Smith is a man of business,” said Moon with ponderous precision–“a plain, practical man: a man of affairs; a man of facts and the daylight. He has let down twenty ton of good building bricks suddenly on my head, and I am glad to say they have woken me up. We went to sleep a little while ago on this very lawn, in this very sunlight. We have had a little nap for five years or so, but now we’re going to be married, Rosamund, and I can’t see why that cab...”

“Really,” said Rosamund stoutly, “I don’t know what you mean.”

“What a lie!” cried Michael, advancing on her with brightening eyes. “I’m all for lies in an ordinary way; but don’t you see that to-night they won’t do? We’ve wandered into a world of facts, old girl. That grass growing, and that sun going down, and that cab at the door, are facts. You used to torment and excuse yourself by saying I was after your money, and didn’t really love you. But if I stood here now and told you I didn’t love you–you wouldn’t believe me: for truth is in this garden to-night.”

“Really, Mr. Moon...” said Rosamund, rather more faintly.

He kept two big blue magnetic eyes fixed on her face. “Is my name Moon?” he asked. “Is your name Hunt? On my honour, they sound to me as quaint and as distant as Red Indian names. It’s as if your name was ‘Swim’ and my name was ‘Sunrise.’ But our real names are Husband and Wife, as they were when we fell asleep.”

“It is no good,” said Rosamund, with real tears in her eyes; “one can never go back.”

“I can go where I damn please,” said Michael, “and I can carry you on my shoulder.”

“But really, Michael, really, you must stop and think!” cried the girl earnestly. “You could carry me off my feet, I dare say, soul and body, but it may be bitter bad business for all that. These things done in that romantic rush, like Mr. Smith’s, they– they do attract women, I don’t deny it. As you say, we’re all telling the truth to-night. They’ve attracted poor Mary, for one. They attract me, Michael. But the cold fact remains: imprudent marriages do lead to long unhappiness and disappointment– you’ve got used to your drinks and things–I shan’t be pretty much longer–”

“Imprudent marriages!” roared Michael. “And pray where in earth or heaven are there any prudent marriages? Might as well talk about prudent suicides. You and I have dawdled round each other long enough, and are we any safer than Smith and Mary Gray, who met last night? You never know a husband till you marry him. Unhappy! of course you’ll be unhappy. Who the devil are you that you shouldn’t be unhappy, like the mother that bore you? Disappointed! of course we’ll be disappointed. I, for one, don’t expect till I die to be so good a man as I am at this minute– a tower with all the trumpets shouting.”

“You see all this,” said Rosamund, with a grand sincerity in her solid face, “and do you really want to marry me?”

“My darling, what else is there to do?” reasoned the Irishman. “What other occupation is there for an active man on this earth, except to marry you? What’s the alternative to marriage, barring sleep? It’s not liberty, Rosamund. Unless you marry God, as our nuns do in Ireland, you must marry Man–that is Me. The only third thing is to marry yourself– yourself, yourself, yourself–the only companion that is never satisfied– and never satisfactory.”

“Michael,” said Miss Hunt, in a very soft voice, “if you won’t talk so much, I’ll marry you.”

“It’s no time for talking,” cried Michael Moon; “singing is the only thing. Can’t you find that mandoline of yours, Rosamund?”

“Go and fetch it for me,” said Rosamund, with crisp and sharp authority.

The lounging Mr. Moon stood for one split second astonished; then he shot away across the lawn, as if shod with the feathered shoes out of the Greek fairy tale. He cleared three yards and fifteen daisies at a leap, out of mere bodily levity; but when he came within a yard or two of the open parlour windows, his flying feet fell in their old manner like lead; he twisted round and came back slowly, whistling. The events of that enchanted evening were not at an end.

Inside the dark sitting-room of which Moon had caught a glimpse a curious thing had happened, almost an instant after the intemperate exit of Rosamund. It was something which, occurring in that obscure parlour, seemed to Arthur Inglewood like heaven and earth turning head over heels, the sea being the ceiling and the stars the floor. No words can express how it astonished him, as it astonishes all simple men when it happens. Yet the stiffest female stoicism seems separated from it only by a sheet of paper or a sheet of steel. It indicates no surrender, far less any sympathy. The most rigid and ruthless woman can begin to cry, just as the most effeminate man can grow a beard. It is a separate sexual power, and proves nothing one way or the other about force of character. But to young men ignorant of women, like Arthur Inglewood, to see Diana Duke crying was like seeing a motor-car shedding tears of petrol.

He could never have given (even if his really manly modesty had permitted it) any vaguest vision of what he did when he saw that portent. He acted as men do when a theatre catches fire–very differently from how they would have conceived themselves as acting, whether for better or worse. He had a faint memory of certain half-stifled explanations, that the heiress was the one really paying guest, and she would go, and the bailiffs (in consequence) would come; but after that he knew nothing of his own conduct except by the protests it evoked.