y, the months in between had
slipped awry--"wasn't true, Dick. I----"

He drew her to him quickly again, and this time he kissed her lips.
"Let's forget it," he said softly. "I have only got to-day and
to-morrow, I don't want to remember what a self-satisfied prig I was."

"Is it to be as soon as that?" she asked. "And I shall only have had you
for so short a time."

"It is a short time," Dick assented. "But I am going to make the best
of it; you wait till you have heard my plans."

He laughed at her because she pointed out that the flowers could not be
left to die, but he helped her to arrange them in the tall, clean vases.
They won back to a brief, almost childish, happiness over the work, but
when the last vase had been finished and carried back to its proper
place, he caught hold of her hands again.

"Now," he said, "let's talk real hard, honest sense; but first, where's
my room?"

She led him silently to the little room behind the drawing-room. She had
taken it over again since her return; the pictures she liked best were
on the walls, her books lay about on the table. The same armchair stood
by the window; he could almost see her as he had seen her that first
morning, her great brown eyes, wakened to newfound fear, staring into
the garden.

"You shall sit here," he said, leading her to the chair. It rather
worried him to see the dumb misery in her eyes. "And I shall sit down on
the floor at your feet. I can hold your hands and I can see your face,
and your whole adorable self is near to me, that's what my heart has
been hungering for. Now--will you marry me the day after to-morrow,
before I go?"

"Dick," she said quickly; she was speaking out of the pain in her heart,
"why do you ask me? Why have you come back? Haven't you been fighting
against it all this time because you knew that I--because some part of
you doesn't want to marry me?"

His eyes never wavered from hers, but he lifted the hands he held to his
lips and kissed them. "When I saw you again in that theatre in
Sevenoaks," he said, "it is perfectly true, one side of me argued with
the other. When I came to your rooms and found that other man there,
green jealousy just made me blind, and pride--which was distinctly
jarred, Joan"--he tried to wake an answering smile in her eyes--"kept
me away all this time."

"Then why have you come back?" she repeated.

"Because I love you," he answered. "It is a very hackneyed word, dear,
but it means a lo