h me...." He leaned across Mrs. Merrithew's broad lap in a great
fear of not being sufficiently plain. "Make her understand," he said,
"that I want her to stay always."

"I guess," said Mrs. Merrithew, a dry smile twinkling in the placidity
of her countenance, "you'd better take me right home first, and then you
can explain to her yourself."

XII

"And you are sure," asked Peter, "that you are not going to mind my
being so much older?"

"Oh, I'm going to mind it: There will be times when I shall be afraid of
not living up to it. But the most part of my minding will be, since you
are so much better acquainted with life than I am, that in any matter in
which we shouldn't agree I shall be so much the more sure of your being
right. It's going to be a great help to us, having something like that
to go by."

"Oh," said Peter, "you put it very prettily, my dear."

He was aware as soon as he had said it, that she would have a way always
of putting things prettily, and that not for the sake of any
prettiness, but because it was so intrinsically she saw them. It would
make everything much simpler that she was always sufficiently to be
believed.

"It isn't, you know," she went on, "as if I should have continually to
prop up my confidence with my affection as I might with a man of less
experience. Oh!" she threw out her arms with a beautiful upward motion,
"you give me so much room, Peter."

"Well, more than I would give you at this moment if we were not in a
gondola on a public highway!"

He amazed himself at the felicity with which during the three days of
their engagement he had been able to take that note with her, still more
at the entertainment of her shy response. It gave him a new and enlarged
perception of himself as a man acquainted with passion. All that had
been withheld from him, by the mere experience of missing, he was able
to bestow with largesse. The witchery and charm that had been done on
him, he worked--if he were but to put his arm about her now, to draw
her so that her head rested on his shoulder, with a certain pressure,
he could feel all her being flower delicately to that beguilement. He
had promised himself, when he had her promise, that she should never
miss anything, and he had a certain male satisfaction in being able to
make good. What he did now, in deference to their being as they were in
the full light of day and the plying traffic, was to say:

"Then if I were to put it to you