Page:The Sacred Fount (New York, Charles Scribner's Sons, 1901).djvu/239

 My companion stared. "At this extraordinary hour?"

"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." 233