ty
good reason, isn't it?"

The temptation was strong enough and sudden enough to make him waver, but
all the disgust came back to him that was his when he lay in the grass
fighting gnats and cursing adventure, and he answered,--

"No; it is worse than no reason at all. I don't care to marry you as a
matter of expedience--"

"You are the most ridiculous creature!" she broke in, with a flash of her
old-time anger. "You talk love and marriage to me, very much against my
wish, and go mooning around over the plantation week after week because
you can't have me, and look at me when you think I'm not noticing and
when all the time I'm wondering when you had your last square meal
because of the hungry look in your eyes, and make eyes at my revolver-
belt hanging on a nail, and fight duels about me, and all the
rest--and--and now, when I say I'll marry you, you do yourself the honour
of refusing me."

"You can't make me any more ridiculous than I feel," he answered, rubbing
the lump on his forehead reflectively. "And if this is the accepted
romantic programme--a duel over a girl, and the girl rushing into the
arms of the winner--why, I shall not make a bigger ass of myself by going
in for it."

"I thought you'd jump at it," she confessed, with a naivete he could not
but question, for he thought he saw a roguish gleam in her eyes.

"My conception of love must differ from yours then," he said. "I should
want a woman to marry me for love of me, and not out of romantic
admiration because I was lucky enough to drill a hole in a man's shoulder
with smokeless powder. I tell you I am disgusted with this adventure
tomfoolery and rot. I don't like it. Tudor is a sample of the adventure-
kind--picking a quarrel with me and behaving like a monkey, insisting on
fighting with me--'to the death,' he said. It was like a penny
dreadful."

She was biting her lip, and though her eyes were cool and level-looking
as ever, the tell-tale angry red was in her cheeks.

"Of course, if you don't want to marry me--"

"But I do," he hastily interposed.

"Oh, you do--"

"But don't you see, little girl, I want you to love me," he hurried on.
"Otherwise, it would be only half a marriage. I don't want you to marry
me simply because by so doing a stop is put to the beach gossip, nor do I
want you to marry me out of some foolish romantic notion. I shouldn't
want you . . . that way."

"Oh, in that case," she said with assumed deliberaten