"Suppose we omit some of the conversation," suggested Ingram, "and assume all that sort of thing to have been said. You are hurt because I showed your letter to a friend. Aren't you taking a distorted view of the matter? Recollect that at the time you were an utter stranger, and your letter was a bolt from the blue. I cannot see that I committed so very great a crime."
"It is as great or as little as you feel it to be."
"And how may it be purged?" asked Ingram ironically.
"Ponder over it till you perceive its enormity, then apologize to me in the presence of the woman."
Morgan scarcely realised what he was saying till the words were out. Apparently he had spoken without hesitating and without thinking, but he knew that his utterance was the result of all that had occupied his mind for many days past. He felt now he was on the road towards the realisation of that fantastic future, that poem in life that was to take the place of the poetry in words he had abandoned.
Ingram gave him a strange, piercing look. Morgan had never before seen in his face such an expression as he saw in it now. There was a pregnant pause before the reply came.
"Very well, then. We will go to her to-night. No doubt the others will now be glad to hear our views on tobacco smoke."
Morgan was conscious of a strange glow of pleasure, of a strange satisfaction. All his sense of romance and mystery was astir. How charming was the promise of the phantasy to come! The smiling, scented serpent-woman was holding her arms to him! And again those lines of Browning echoed through him, and his whole being seemed invaded as by a "faint sweetness from some old Egyptian's fine, worm-eaten shroud."
He defended moderate smoking with vivacity.
Afterwards, the guests being disposed for conversation in the drawing-room, Helen managed to sit with Morgan a little apart.