"It was two o'clock in the morning."
"A rather inconvenient hour," he exclaimed with a laugh. "Would not ten or eleven o'clock suit her as well? But it is enough that she should be a woman to be perverse. If you think that there is any chance of our meeting her to-night, I should be glad to accompany you. Two heads are better than one in a business of this kind."
"I am willing to go. Yet there is no reason why she should be there."
"We shall have the moon with us, at all events," he said; "for there she is, crawling up yonder, though with a sinister disc."
He pointed to the trees, above which the moon, large, red, and dim, like a cloud shone on by the expiring sun, was slowly sailing up.
"It is now half-past ten," I remarked. "It may prove after all a fool's errand. However we can sip our grog and stroll out afterwards, if you like—go, at all events, to the fields, and linger in the cool till you shall think proper to return."
He consented, though assuring me it would be no inconvenience to him to sit through the night. He was anxious, he added, that I should have my mind cleared of the odd fancies that encumbered it; and very proud and happy would it make him to believe that he had been instrumental in solving any problem that perplexed, or helping forward any desires that agitated me.
I did not doubt, though he was cautious not to suggest, that he thought me a very odd, fanciful, even half-crazy being. A downright practical intrigue, a transparent love-affair, he could very readily have understood; but a passion excited by meeting a woman under circumstances so strange, a love inflamed by superstition and yet made imbecile by timidity, it was not in his nature to comprehend. It was fortunate perhaps that his polite incredulity curbed my natural tendency to rhapsodise, or I might have written myself down a greater ass in his eyes than he was disposed to think me.