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62 turned the corner and disappeared. For a moment Denham stopped involuntarily in his sentence, and continued it with a sense of having lost something.

Unconscious that they were observed, Katharine and Rodney had come out on the Embankment. When they had crossed the road, Rodney slapped his hand upon the stone parapet above the river and exclaimed:

“I promise I won’t say another word about it, Katharine! But do stop a minute and look at the moon upon the water.”

Katharine paused, looked up and down the river, and snuffed the air.

“I’m sure one can smell the sea, with the wind blowing this way,” she said.

They stood silent for a few moments while the river shifted in its bed, and the silver and red lights which were laid upon it were torn by the current and joined together again. Very far off up the river a steamer hooted with its hollow voice of unspeakable melancholy, as if from the heart of lonely mist-shrouded voyagings.

“Ah!” Rodney cried, striking his hand once more upon the balustrade, “why can’t one say how beautiful it all is? Why am I condemned for ever, Katharine, to feel what I can’t express? And the things I can give there’s no use in my giving. Trust me, Katharine,” he added hastily, “I won’t speak of it again. But in the presence of beauty—look at the iridescence round the moon!—one feels—one feels—Perhaps if you married me—I’m half a poet, you see, and I can’t pretend not to feel what I do feel. If I could write—ah, that would be another matter. I shouldn’t bother you to marry me then, Katharine.”

He spoke these disconnected sentences rather abruptly, with his eyes alternately upon the moon and upon the stream.

“But for me I suppose you would recommend