with him. But he forced her to skate slowly.

"You'll trample on that, too, will you?" said he, growing wrathful under
her silence.

But she answered, quite gently, now: "No, Mr. Kendrick, I don't trample
on that. No girl would. I simply--know you are mistaken."

"In what? My own feeling? Do you think I don't know--"

"I _know_ you don't know. I'm not your kind of a girl, Mr. Kendrick. You
think I am, because--well, perhaps because my eyes are blue and my
eyelashes black; just such things as that do mislead people. I can dance
fairly well--"

He smothered an angry exclamation.

"And skate well--and play the 'cello a little--and--that's nearly all
you know about me. You don't even know whether I can teach well--or talk
well--or what is stored away in my mind. And I know just as little about
you."

"I've learned one thing about you in this last minute," he muttered.
"You can keep your head."

"Why not?" There was a note of laughter in her voice. "There needs to be
one who keeps her head when the other loses his--all because of a little
winter moonlight. What would the summer moonlight do to you, I wonder?"

"Roberta Gray"--his voice was rough--"the moonlight does it no more than
the sunlight. Whatever you think, I'm not that kind of fellow. The day
I saw you first you had just come in out of the rain. You went back into
it and I saw you go--and wanted to go with you. I've been wanting it
ever since."

They moved on in silence which lasted until they were within a
quarter-mile of the bonfire, whose flashing light they could see above
the banks which intervened. Then Roberta spoke:

"Mr. Kendrick"--and her voice was low and rich with its kindest
inflections--"I don't want you to think me careless or hard because I
have treated what you have said to-night in a way that you don't like.
I'm only trying to be honest with you. I'm quite sure you didn't mean to
say it to me when you came to-night, and--we all do and say things on a
night like this that we should like to take back next day. It's quite
true--what I said--that you hardly know me, and whatever it is that
takes your fancy it can't be the real Roberta Gray, because you don't
know her!"

"What you say is," he returned, staring straight ahead of him, "that I
can't possibly know what you really are, at all; but you know so well
what I am that you can tell me exactly what my own thoughts and feelings
are."

"Oh, no, I didn't mean--"

"That's precisely w