The young girl turned upon Wolf her steady, unprovocative, indulgent gaze. “Perhaps,” she said quietly, after a moment in which Wolf felt as though his mind had encountered her mind like two bodiless shadows in a flowing river⁠—“perhaps in this case it will be different. Would you marry her if it were different?” These words were added in a tone that had the sort of faint aqueous mischief in it, such as a water-nymph might have indulged in, contemplating the rather heavy earth-loves of a pair of mortals.

“Oh, confound it, that’s going a little too fast, even for me!” Wolf protested. And, in the silence that followed, it seemed to him as if these two people, this Darnley and this Christie, had managed between them, in some sort of subtle conspiracy, to take off the delicious edge of his furtive obsession.