fore, it seemed natural that he should--"we
haven't got much. You know, don't you, why I asked you to drive with
me?"

She in her turn was silent a moment, then meeting his eyes:

"Yes," she said, quite simply and courageously.

"I thought you could hardly help seeing I loved you, however blind other
people might be."

Her head was turned away again and she looked out of the window, as she
answered in a voice that tried to be light:

"But it isn't of any consequence, is it? I suppose you're always in love
with somebody or other."

"Is that what people told you about me?"--and it was new and wonderful
to her to hear George Goring speak with this calmness and
gravity--"You've not been long in the world, little girl, or you'd know
how much to believe of what's said there."

"No," she answered, in turn becoming calm and deliberate. "When I come
to think of it, people only say that women generally like you and that
you flirt with them. I--I invented the rest."

"But, good Heavens! Why?" There was a note of pain and wonder in his
voice.

She paused, and his hand moved under her cloak to be laid on the two
slender hands clasped on her lap.

"I suppose I was jealous," she said.

He smiled.

"Absurd child! But I'm a bit of an ass that way myself. I was jealous of
Thomas the Rhymer this evening."

"That brat!"

She laughed low, the sweet laugh that was like no one else's. It was
past midnight and the streets were comparatively quiet and dark, but at
that moment they were whirled into a glare of strong light. They looked
in each other's eyes in silence, his hand tightening its hold upon hers.
Then again they plunged into wavering dimness, and he resumed, gravely
and calmly as before, but bending nearer her.

"If I weren't anxious to tell you the exact truth, to avoid
exaggeration, I should say I fell in love with you the first time I met
you. It seems to me now as though it had been so. And the second
time--you remember it was one very hot day last July, when we both
lunched with Meres--I hadn't the least doubt that if I had been free and
you also, I should have left no stone unturned to get you for my wife."

Every word was sweet to her, yet she answered sombrely:

"But we are not free."

He, disregarding the answer, went on:

"You love me, as I love you?"

"As you love me, dearest; and from the first."

A minute's silence, while the hands held each other fast. Then low,
triumphantly, he exclaimed: "W