He had now time for meditation.  There are few situations which provide more scope for meditation than that of the man penned up on a small balcony a considerable distance from the ground, with his only avenue of retreat cut off behind him.  So George meditated.  First, he mused on Plummer.  He thought some hard thoughts about Plummer.  Then he brooded on the unkindness of a fortune which had granted him the opportunity of this meeting with Maud, only to snatch it away almost before it had begun.  He wondered how long the late Lord Leonard had been permitted to talk on that occasion before he, too, had had to retire through these same windows.  There was no doubt about one thing.  Lovers who chose that room for their interviews seemed to have very little luck.

It had not occurred to George at first that there could be any further disadvantage attached to his position other than the obvious drawbacks which had already come to his notice.  He was now to perceive that he had been mistaken.  A voice was speaking in the room he had left, a plainly audible voice, deep and throaty; and within a minute George had become aware that he was to suffer the additional discomfort of being obliged to listen to a fellow man—­one could call Plummer that by stretching the facts a little—­proposing marriage.  The gruesomeness of the situation became intensified.  Of all moments when a man—­and justice compelled George to admit that Plummer was technically human—­of all moments when a man may by all the laws of decency demand to be alone without an audience of his own sex, the chiefest is the moment when he is asking a girl to marry him.  George’s was a sensitive nature, and he writhed at the thought of playing the eavesdropper at such a time.

He looked frantically about him for a means of escape.  Plummer had now reached the stage of saying at great length that he was not worthy of Maud.  He said it over and over, again in different ways.  George was in hearty agreement with him, but he did not want to hear it.  He wanted to get away.  But how?  Lord Leonard on a similar occasion had leaped.  Some might argue therefore on the principle that what man has done, man can do, that George should have imitated him.  But men differ.  There was a man attached to a circus who used to dive off the roof of Madison Square Garden on to a sloping board, strike it with his chest, turn a couple of somersaults, reach the ground, bow six times and go off to lunch.  That sort of thing is a gift.  Some of us have it, some have not.  George had not.  Painful as it was to hear Plummer floundering through his proposal of marriage, instinct told him that it would be far more painful to hurl himself out into mid-air on the sporting chance of having his downward progress arrested by the branches of the big tree that had upheld Lord Leonard.  No, there seemed nothing for it but to remain where he was.

Inside the room Plummer was now saying how much the marriage would please his mother.