Suddenly she got to her feet with a passionate exclamation, her
clenched hands went to her temples in an agony of emotion. "Can't you
understand?" she repeated. "It's the going back at all for three days,
for three hours, for three minutes that counts. It might spoil
everything; it might kill my life."

His face flushed, crimsoned, then became pale; his hands ceased moving;
the knitting lay still on his knee. "Maybe, but you aren't going back
for three minutes, any more than I'm going back to the oriel window for
three seconds," he said. "We dreamers have a lot of agony in thinking
about the things we're never going to do--just as much agony as in
thinking about the things we've done. Every one of us dreamers ought to
be insulated. We ought to wear emotional lightning-rods to carry off the
brain-waves into the ground.

"I've never heard such a wonderful story," he added, after an instant,
with an intense longing to hold out his arms to her, and a still more
intense will to do no such wrong. A blind man had no right or title to
be a slave-owner, for that was what marriage to him would be. A wife
would be a victim. He saw himself, felt himself being gradually
devitalized, with only the placid brain left, considering only the
problem of hourly comfort, and trying to neutralize the penalties of
blindness. She must not be sacrificed to that, for apart from all else
she had greatness of a kind in her. He knew far better than he had said
of the storm of emotion in her, and he knew that she had not exaggerated
the temptation which sang in her ears. Jethro Fawe--the thought of the
man revolted him; and yet there was something about the fellow,
a temperamental power, the glamour and garishness of Nature's gifts,
prostituted though they were, finding expression in a striking