"I _thought_ I did," she said. "Just for a minute."
She leaned her elbows on the gate and stared out over the moonlit mysteries of the Park.
"You're not a bit what I expected," she said.
I misunderstood her. "But you can't..." I began.
I felt a thrill of hope. "But neither are you," I said.
"I've had romantic visions, too," I went on; "of what she would look like when I did meet her. But when I saw you, I remembered, and all the visions--oh! scattered; vanished into thin air."
"If you hadn't been so successful..." she murmured.
"I'm sorry for that," I agreed. "But I'm going to make amends. I realised it all this afternoon in the wood when I went to meet Arthur. I'm going to begin all over again, now. I'm coming to Canada--to work." The whole solution of my problem was suddenly clear, although I had not guessed it until that moment. "I'm going to buy a farm for all of us," I went on quickly, "and all the money that's over, I shall give away. The hospitals are always willing to accept money without asking why you give it. They're not suspicious, _they_ don't consider themselves under any obligation."
"How much should you have to give away?" she asked.
"Thirty or forty thousand pounds," I said. "It depends on how much the farm costs."
"Hadn't you better keep a little, in case the farm fails?" she put in.
"And you'd do all that just because you've--remembered me?"
"There was another influence," I admitted.
"What was that?" she asked, with the sound of new interest in her voice.
"All this affair with the Jervaises," I said. "It has made me hate the possession of money and the power money gives. That farm of ours is going to be a communal farm. Our workers shall have an interest in the profits. No one is to be the proprietor. We'll all be one family--no scraping for favours, or fears of dismissal; we'll all be equal and free."
She did not answer that, at once; and I had an unpleasant feeling that she was testing my quality by some criterion of her own, weighing the genuineness of my emotion.
"Did you feel like this about things this afternoon?" she asked, after what seemed to me an immense interval.
I was determined to tell her nothing less than the truth. "No," I confessed, "much of it was a result of what you said to me. I--I had an illumination. You made me see what a poor thing my life had been; how conventional, artificial, worthless, it was. What you said about my plays was so true. I had never realised it before--I hadn't bothered to think about it."