“Marry you now—­this of afternoon!” she cried, aghast.  “Hugh, are you in your right senses?”

“Yes,” he said, “I’m reasonable for the first time in my life.”

She laughed, and immediately became serious.  But when she sought to marshal her arguments, she found that they had fled.

“Oh, but I couldn’t,” she answered.  “And besides, there are so many things I ought to do.  I—­I haven’t any clothes.”

But this was a plea he could not be expected to recognize.  He saw no reason why she could not buy as many as she wanted after the ceremony.

“Is that all?” he demanded.

“No—­that isn’t all.  Can’t you see that—­that we ought to wait, Hugh?”

“No,” he exclaimed, “No I can’t see it.  I can only see that every moment of waiting would be a misery for us both.  I can only see that the situation, as it is to-day, is an intolerable one for you.”

She had not expected him to see this.

“There are others to be thought of,” she said, after a moment’s hesitation.

“What others?”

The answer she should have made died on her lips.

“It seems so-indecorous, Hugh.”

“Indecorous!” he cried, and pushed back his chair and rose.  “What’s indecorous about it?  To leave you here alone in a hotel in New York would not only be indecorous, but senseless.  How long would you put it off? a week—­a month—­a year?  Where would you go in the meantime, and what would you do?”

“But your friends, Hugh—­and mine?”

“Friends!  What have they got to do with it?”

It was the woman, now, who for a moment turned practical—­and for the man’s sake.  She loved, and the fair fabric of the future which they were to weave together, and the plans with which his letters had been filled and of which she had dreamed in exile, had become to-day as the stuff of which moonbeams are made.  As she looked up at him, eternity itself did not seem long enough for the fulfilment of that love.  But he?  Would the time not come when he would demand something more? and suppose that something were denied?  She tried to rouse herself, to think, to consider a situation in which her instinct had whispered just once—­there must be some hidden danger:  but the electric touch of his hand destroyed the process, and made her incapable of reason.

“What should we gain by a week’s or a fortnight’s delay,” he was saying, “except so much misery?”

She looked around the hotel sitting-room, and tried to imagine the desolation of it, stripped of his presence.  Why not?  There was reason in what he said.  And yet, if she had known it, it was not to reason she yielded, but to the touch of his hand.

“We will be married to-day,” he decreed.  “I have planned it all.  I have bought the ‘Adhemar’, the yacht which I chartered last winter.  She is here.  We’ll go off on her together, away from the world, for as long as you like.  And then,” he ended triumphantly, “then we’ll go back to Grenoble and begin our life.”