"Well?" he said.
"You know I didn't mean to be cross, don't you?" she asked him in a hurried undertone.
"You absurd little silly!" was all he said.
They sat for a long time over tea, and neither of them felt inclined to talk. But the silence was not embarrassing. And the early spring day drew to a close and the room grew dark with shadows; and still they sat there, and it did not occur to either of them to make conversation. At last, Katharine stirred in her seat at the end of the sofa and looked towards the dim outline of his figure against the window, and finished her reflections out loud.
"After all," she said thoughtfully, "the great thing is to be sane. Nothing else matters much if one can only be sane about things. There are heaps of reasons why you and I should not marry, if we were to begin hunting them up; but why bother about it? You know and I know that we have simply got to try the experiment, and chance the rest. One must risk something. And it can't be much worse than going on alone like this."
"No," said Paul, "it can't be worse than that."
He came and sat on the sofa, too, and there was silence once more. He put out his hand to find hers, and she gave it him and laughed softly.
"I have an idea," she said irrelevantly. "We must marry Ted to Marion."
"We?" said Paul, smiling. And she laughed again.
"Isn't it ridiculous," she said, "after all our views about marriage and so on,—to end in behaving just like any one else who never had any views at all?"