"Ah, the hour," I laughed, "is no more extraordinary than any other part
of the business: no more so, for instance, than this present talk of
yours and mine. What part of the business isn't extraordinary? If it
_is_, at all events, remarkably late, that's _her_ fault."
Yet he not unnaturally, in spite of my explanation, continued to wonder.
"And--a--where is it then you meet?"
"Oh, in the drawing-room or the hall. So good-night."
He got up to it, moving with me to the door; but his mystification,
little as I could, on the whole, soothe it, still kept me. "The
household sits up for you?"
I wondered myself, but found an assurance. "She must have squared the
household! And it won't probably take us very long."
His mystification frankly confessed itself, at this, plain curiosity.
The ground of such a conference, for all the point I had given his
ingenuity, simply baffled him. "Do you mean you propose to discuss with
her----?"
"My dear fellow," I smiled with my hand on the door, "it's _she_--don't
you see?--who proposes."
"But what in the world----?"
"Oh, _that_ I shall have to wait to tell you."
"With all the other things?" His face, while he sounded mine, seemed to
say that I must then take his expectation as serious. But it seemed to
say also that he was--definitely, yes--more at a loss than consorted
with being quite sure of me. "Well, it will make a lot, really----!" But
he broke off. "You do," he sighed with an effort at resignation, "know
more than I!"
"And haven't I admitted that?"
"I'll be hanged if you _don't_ know who he is!" the poor fellow, for all
answer, now produced.
He said it as if I had, after all, not been playing fair, and it made me
for an instant hesitate. "No, I really don't know. But it's exactly what
I shall perhaps now learn."
"You mean that what she has proposed is to _tell_ you?"
His darkness had so deepened that I saw only now what I should have seen
sooner--the misconception that, in my excessive estimate of the distance
he had come with me, I had not at first caught. But it was a
misconception that only enriched his testimony; it involved such a
conviction of the new link between our two sacrificed friends that it
immediately constituted for me the strongest light he would, in our
whole talk, have thrown. Yes, he had not yet thrown so much as in this
erroneous supposition of the source of my summons. It took me of course,
at the same time, but a few seconds to remind myself again of the
innumerable steps he had necessarily missed. His question meanwhile,
rightly applied by my own thought, brought back to that thought, by way
of answer, an immense suggestion, which moreover, for him too, was
temporarily answer enough. "She'll tell me who he _won't_ have been!"