We were too excited to sup in comfort, or sleep in peace, or to do
anything but plan and speculate. Never till this night had we talked
with absolute mutual confidence, for Davies broke down the last
barriers of reserve and let me see his whole mind. He loved this girl
and he loved his country, two simple passions which for the time
absorbed his whole moral capacity. There was no room left for
casuistry. To weigh one passion against the other, with the
discordant voices of honour and expediency dinning in his ears, had
too long involved him in fruitless torture. Both were right; neither
could be surrendered. If the facts showed them irreconcilable, _tant
pis pour les faits._ A way must be found to satisfy both or neither.

I should have been a spiritless dog if I had not risen to his mood.
But in truth his cutting of the knot was at this juncture exactly
what appealed to me. I, too, was tired of vicarious casuistry, and
the fascination of our enterprise, intensified by the discovery of
that afternoon, had never been so strong in me. Not to be insincere,
I cannot pretend that I viewed the situation with his single mind. My
philosophy when I left London was of a very worldly sort, and no one
can change his temperament in three weeks. I plainly said as much to
Davies, and indeed took perverse satisfaction in stating with brutal
emphasis some social truths which bore on this attachment of his to
the daughter of an outlaw. Truths I call them, but I uttered them
more by rote than by conviction, and he heard them unmoved. And
meanwhile I snatched recklessly at his own solution. If it imparted
into our adventure a strain of crazy chivalry more suited to
knights-errant of the Middle Ages than to sober modern youths--well,
thank Heaven, I was not too sober, and still young enough to snatch
at that fancy with an ardour of imagination, if not of character;