Stafford stopped at this and looked at the reflection of the stars in the shallow water.

Something in its simplicitude and the quiet, coming after the glitter and the noise of the ball-room, called up the remembrance of Herondale, and the quiet, love-laden hours he had spent there with Ida.

The thought went through him with a sharp pain, and he thrust it away from him as one thrusts away a threatening weakness.
"What is it you wanted to say to me ?" asked Maude, not coldly or indifferently as she would have asked the question of another man, but softly, dreamily.
He walked on with her a few paces, looking straight before him as if he were trying to find words suitable for the answer; then he turned his face to her and looked at her steadily, though his head was burning and the plash of the fountain sounded like the roar of the sea in his ears.
"I wonder whether you could guess ?" he said, as he thought of her father's words, his assertion that Stafford was to be his son-in-law.
"I suppose you must." Her gaze was as steady as his, but her lips quivered slightly.
"I would rather you should tell me than that I should I guess," she said in a low voice.

"I might be wrong." He was not in a condition to notice the significance of her last words, and he went on with a kind of desperation.
"I brought you here into the garden, Miss Falconer, to ask you if you'd be my wife." They had stopped just within the radius of an electric light, held aloft by a grinning satyr, and Stafford saw her face grow paler and paler in the seconds that followed the momentous question.

He could see her bosom heaving under the half-open fur cloak, felt her hand close for an instant on his arm.
"Do you wish me to say 'Yes' ?" she asked in a low voice.
The red flooded Stafford's face for a moment, and his eyes fell under her fixed regard.
"What answer does one generally hope for when one puts such a question ?" he said, trying to smile.