"Well, I don't mind if I do. After supper's a good time. Father goes up the town to play billiards. After eight."
"When?"
"What about to-morrow evening?"
"All right. Where?"
"Up to the Mill. Five minutes up from here."
"I'll be there," he said.
"Don't let father catch 'ee--that's all," she smiled down at him. "You'm a fule, Mr. Brandon, to bother with such as I." He said nothing and she walked away. Very shortly after, Davray got up from his seat and came over to Falk's corner. It was obvious that he had been drinking rather heavily. He was a little unsteady on his feet.
"You're young Brandon, aren't you?" he asked.
In ordinary times Falk would have told him to go to the devil, and there would have been a row, but to-day he was caught away so absolutely into his own world that any one could speak to him, any one laugh at him, any one insult him, and he would not care. He had been meditating for weeks the advance that he had just taken; always when one meditates for long over a risk it swells into gigantic proportions. So this had been; that simple sentence asking her to come out and talk to him had seemed an impossible challenge to every kind of fate, and now, in a moment, the gulf had been jumped...so easy, so strangely easy....
From a great distance Davray's words came to him, and in the dialogue that followed he spoke like a somnambulist.