said Jane. Her hands lay idle now in her lap, and she no longer
tried to extract the white ostrich feather from her fan.

'I want to know if you think you can care for me a little?'

Probably when a man feels most deeply his utterances are the most
commonplace, and an Englishman is proverbially incapable of expressing
his feelings. In the supreme moments of their lives, it is true, a few
men, and those not always the most sincere, may speak eloquently; but
for the most part a proposal of marriage from an Englishman is--as it
should be--a clumsy thing. Peter Ogilvie could only speak in such
limited language as he always used. Yet the world seemed to stand
still for him just then, for he knew that everything in his heaven or
upon earth depended on what Jane's answer would be.

'Don't let me bother you,' he said at last, 'or rush you into giving an
answer now if you would rather wait.'

Perhaps a declaration of love from an old comrade is the most dear as
well as the most embarrassing of all such avowals. A heart which has
already given itself in loyalty and affection to another finds that it
is not a deepening of this loyalty and affection that is asked, but a
complete re-ordering of things. The lover's petition, therefore,
either comes to the woman as a revelation, betraying to her in a flash
that she has loved always, and has merely been calling the thing by
another name, or else it finds her impatient at the disturbance of an
old comradeship, a cherished friendship, which nothing but this
foolish, exacting thing called love could ever shake.

Peter was not versed in introspective questions or hair-splittings; he
loved with his whole heart, and he had tried to say so without very
much success. Just then he would have given anything he possessed to
be endowed with a little more eloquence, though deep down in his heart
he had a lingering hope that perhaps Jane would understand. 'It's neck
or nothing,' he was saying to himself, in the homely jargon in which he
usually formed his thoughts. 'God knows I may have been a fool to
speak.'

'Peter,' began Jane shyly. And Peter ceased twisting the silk cord of
the programme round his finger, and they turned and looked at each
other.

'Is it true?' he said at last, with a queer kind of wonder in his voice.

'Let us go into the garden,' he said. His instincts remained
primitive, and just then this room was too narrow for all he felt, and
it seemed to him that th