She laughed, and at the silvery sound of it I plucked up a hint of
courage; for surely, I thought, she wasn't cruel enough to make game
of me as she turned me down. Still, I couldn't really hope. She was too
wonderful, and my courtship had been too inadequate. Despondent, arms on
my knees, I harped upon the same string.

"I've never had a chance to show you," I lamented, "that I am civilized;
that I know how to take care of you and put cushions behind you and
slide footstools under your feet, and--er--all that. We've been too busy
eluding Germans and racing through forbidden zones and rescuing papers
from behind secret panels, for me to wait on you. Good heavens! To think
how I've done my duty by a hundred girls I shouldn't know from Eve if
they happened along this moment! And I've never even sent you a box of
_marrons glaces_ or flowers."

She shot a fleeting glance at me.

"No," she agreed, "you haven't! If you don't mind my saying so, I
think they would have been out of place. At Bleau, for instance, and at
Prezelay I hadn't much time for eating bonbons; but after all you did me
one or two more practical services, Mr. Bayne."

"Nothing," I maintained, my gloom unabated, "that amounted to a row of
pins. Though I might have shone, I'll admit; I can see that, looking
back. The opportunity was there, but the man was lacking. I might have
been a real movie hero, cool, resourceful, dependable, clear-sighted, a
tower of strength; and what I did was to muddle things up hopelessly
and waste time in suspecting you and seize every opportunity of trusting
people who positively spread their guilt before my eyes."

"I don't know." She was looking at the lake, not at me, and she was
smiling. "There were one or two little matters that have slipped your
mind, perhaps. Take the very first night we met, when you tracked your
thief to my room and wouldn't let the hotel people come in to search it.
Don't you think, on the whole, that you were rather kind?"

"I couldn't have driven them in," I declared stubbornly, "with a
pitchfork. I couldn't have persuaded them to make a search if I had
prayed them on my bended knees. Their one idea was to help the fellow
in what the best criminal circles call a getaway; and when I think how I
must have been wool-gathering, not to guess--"

"Well, even so,"--Miss Falconer was still smiling--"weren't you very
nice on the steamer? About the extra, I mean. And at Gibraltar, too,
when they asked you