has she--has she said anything to you?
About me, I mean; how I might take it, or anything?"

"She said that she couldn't answer for you; that it was your feeling
that must be taken into account. She put me, so to speak, on my own feet
in so far as _that_ was concerned." He waited for her answer to that,
and none coming, though he saw that she grew a little easier, he went on
presently. "There is, however, much that I feel ought to be said about
my feeling for you, what it means to me, what I hoped----" She stopped
him with a gesture; he could see her lovely manner coming back to her as
quiet comes to the surface of a smitten pool.

"That--one may take for granted, may one not? Since you _have_ asked me,
that the feeling that goes to it is all I have a right to ask?"

"Quite, quite," he assured her. "It may be," he managed to smile upon
her here for the easing of her sweet discomposure, "it may very easily
be that I was thinking too much of my pleasure in saying it."

"It would, then, be a pleasure?" She had the air of snatching at that as
something concrete, graspable.

"It would, and it wouldn't. I mean if you were bothered by it. You could
take everything for granted, everything."

"Even," she insisted, "to the point of taking it for granted that you
would take things for granted from me: that you wouldn't expect
anything--any expression, anything more than just accepting you?"

"Ah!" he cried, the wonder, the amazement of success breaking upon him.
"If you accepted me what more _could_ I expect." He had clasped the hand
which she held out to check him and held it against his heart firmly
that she shouldn't see how he trembled.

"I haven't, you know," she reminded him, "but if I was sure--very sure
that you wouldn't ask any more of me than thinking, I ... might think
about it." She was trembling now, though her hand was so cold, and
suddenly a tear gathered and dropped, splashing her fine wrist.

"Oh, my dear, my dear!" he cried, moved more than he had thought it
possible to be; "you can be perfectly sure that there will never be
anything between you and me that shall not be exactly as you wish." He
suited his action to the word, kissing the wet splash and letting her
go.

"Why, then," she recovered herself with the smile that was now strangely
like her mother's, sweeter for being smiled a little awry, "the best
thing you can do is to find poor mamma and let us give her a cup of
tea."

IV

"Pet