them thoughtfully
in the balance. Before speaking, they had signalled their devotion in
a hundred perceptible ways--by their pinkness, their stammering
awkwardness, by the glassy look in their eyes. They had not shot a
proposal at her like a bullet from out of the cover of a conversation
that had nothing to do with their emotions at all.

Yet, now that the shock of it was dying away, she began to remember
signs she would have noticed, speeches which ought to have warned
her....

"Wally!" she gasped.

She found that he affected her in an entirely different fashion from
the luckless dozen of those London days. He seemed to matter more, to
be more important, almost--though she rebelled at the word--more
dangerous.

"Let me take you out of it all! You aren't fit for this sort of life.
I can't bear to see you...."

Jill bent forward and touched his hand. He started as though he had
been burned. The muscles of his throat were working.

"Wally, it's--" She paused for a word. "Kind" was horrible. It would
have sounded cold, almost supercilious. "Sweet" was the sort of thing
she could imagine Lois Denham saying to her friend Izzy. She began her
sentence again. "You're a dear to say that, but...."

Wally laughed chokingly.

"You think I'm altruistic? I'm not. I'm just as selfish and
self-centred as any other man who wants a thing very badly. I'm as
altruistic as a child crying for the moon. I want you to marry me
because I love you, because there never was anybody like you, because
you're the whole world, because I always have loved you. I've been
dreaming about you for a dozen years, thinking about you, wondering
about you--wondering where you were, what you were doing, how you
looked. I used to think that it was just sentimentality, that you
merely stood for a time of my life when I was happier than I have ever
been since. I used to think that you were just a sort of peg on which
I was hanging a pleasant sentimental regret for days which could never
come back. You were a memory that seemed to personify all the other
memories of the best time of my life. You were the goddess of old
associations. Then I met you in London, and it was different. I wanted
you--_you_! I didn't want you because you recalled old times and were
associated with dead happiness, I wanted _you_! I knew I loved you
directly you spoke to me at the theatre that night of the fire. I
loved your voice and your eyes and your smile and your courage. And