"He doesn't look diffident."
"He may not be. I merely make a supposition."
"I think it's an appalling idea."
"Oh, I know, I know, and yet I can imagine it a bridge to paradise."
"I don't understand."
"Then, suppose a man so stormed by love that by it all life has been renewed and made beautiful for him; and suppose this man so utterly and in every way unsuited to its realisation, that though all there is in him urges him to speak of it, yet he dare not lest he should lose even the cold solace of friendship. Do you not see how it might——?"
Mollie's grey eyes looked him straight in the face.
"No," she said. "It would be better for him never to speak, than to lose his ideal, as he assuredly would."
"You—you would bid him never speak?"