id, so sincerely
that it almost showed pain, yet so lucidly that it almost showed
humour, "in fact, you know, I want to BE married. It's--well, it's the
condition."

"The condition--?" He was just vague.

"It's the state, I mean. I don't like my own. 'Miss,' among us all,
is too dreadful--except for a shopgirl. I don't want to be a horrible
English old-maid."

"Oh, you want to be taken care of. Very well then, I'll do it."

"I dare say it's very much that. Only I don't see why, for what I speak
of," she smiled--"for a mere escape from my state--I need do quite so
MUCH."

"So much as marry me in particular?"

Her smile was as for true directness. "I might get what I want for
less."

"You think it so much for you to do?"

"Yes," she presently said, "I think it's a great deal."

Then it was that, though she was so gentle, so quite perfect with him,
and he felt he had come on far--then it was that of a sudden something
seemed to fail and he didn't quite know where they were. There rose for
him, with this, the fact, to be sure, of their disparity, deny it as
mercifully and perversely as she would. He might have been her father.
"Of course, yes--that's my disadvantage: I'm not the natural, I'm so
far from being the ideal match to your youth and your beauty. I've the
drawback that you've seen me always, so inevitably, in such another
light."

But she gave a slow headshake that made contradiction soft--made it
almost sad, in fact, as from having to be so complete; and he had
already, before she spoke, the dim vision of some objection in her mind
beside which the one he had named was light, and which therefore must be
strangely deep. "You don't understand me. It's of all that it is for YOU
to do--it's of that I'm thinking."

Oh, with this, for him, the thing was clearer! "Then you needn't think.
I know enough what it is for me to do."

But she shook her head again. "I doubt if you know. I doubt if you CAN."

"And why not, please--when I've had you so before me? That I'm old has
at least THAT fact about it to the good--that I've known you long and
from far back."

"Do you think you've 'known' me?" asked Charlotte Stant. He
hesitated--for the tone of it, and her look with it might have made him
doubt. Just these things in themselves, however, with all the rest, with
his fixed purpose now, his committed deed, the fine pink glow,
projected forward, of his ships, behind him, definitely blazing and
crackling--this