me again! Come, say it in my ear, sweetheart!
Say that if I fall and am killed in climbing down when I leave you, it
will make no more difference to you than if a dog were drowned in the
canal! Is it not true, dear? Then say it quickly! Only whisper it in my
ear, and I will go away and never come back. But you must say it----'

'Yes--please go!' she answered faintly. 'Go at once----'

'No, you must say the rest first,' he insisted, and his lips were almost
touching her ear. 'Say it after me: "I hate you, I despise you, I loathe
you, I do not care whether you live or die." Why do you not begin to
repeat the words, heart of my heart?'

She turned suddenly in his hold, holding her head far back, wide-eyed
and very pale. But she could not speak, or would not, foreknowing what
must happen now that had never happened to her before.

He smiled faintly, and when he spoke again it was a sweet breath she
felt, rather than a sound that reached her ear.

'Will you not say it?' he said, and his face came slowly nearer to hers.
'Would it not be true? No? Then say "I love you, love," or speak no word
aloud but let your lips make syllables on mine, and, like the blind, the
touch will tell me what you say.'

Her eyes closed of themselves, the speaking breath came nearer, and
then, as lightning flashes through a summer's night, flame ran from her
lips to her feet, and to her heart from her hands that lay in his and
felt his life stirring.

It was innocent enough, a girl's first love-kiss, and the kiss of a man
who loved in earnest for the first time, but it seemed a great and a
fearful thing to her, irrevocable as lost innocence itself; and he,
whose masculine light-heartedness made not much of mere kisses, and
laughed at the thought that love could do much wrong, felt that he had
given a pledge he must redeem and a promise he must honourably keep.

It was innocent enough. He held her by the hands as he bent and kissed
her, for the water was still trickling down his drenched clothes, and
her pretty dressing-gown would have been spoiled if he had even put one
arm round her waist. There was a dash of the ridiculous in that, which
would have made them both laugh if they had not been so simply and
utterly in earnest. And then when he let her hands go and she sank upon
a chair, he could not even sit down beside her, because the velvet seat
would have been ruined. So he stood bolt upright in the midst of the
little puddle the water had