in.

"There are times when you seem to forget that I have at last grown up,
Peter. You never will talk over serious things with me."

"What are serious things?" asked Peter.

"Well," said Honora vaguely, "ambitions, and what one is going to make of
themselves in life. And then you make fun of me by saying you want Mr.
Dwyer's house." She laughed again. "I can't imagine you in that house!"

"Why not?" he asked, stopping beside the pond and thrusting his hands in
his pockets. He looked very solemn, but she knew he was smiling inwardly.

"Why--because I can't," she said, and hesitated. The question had forced
her to think about Peter. "I can't imagine you living all alone in all
that luxury. It isn't like you."

"Why I all alone?" asked Peter.

"Don't--Don't be ridiculous," she said; "you wouldn't build a house like
that, even if you were twice as rich as Mr. Dwyer. You know you wouldn't.
And you're not the marrying kind," she added, with the superior knowledge
of eighteen.

"I'm waiting for you, Honora," he announced.

"You know I love you, Peter,"--so she tempered her reply, for Honora's
feelings were tender. What man, even Peter, would not have married her if
he could? Of course he was in earnest, despite his bantering tone, "but I
never could--marry you."

"Not even if I were to offer you a house like Mr. Dwyer's?" he said. A
remark which betrayed--although not to her--his knowledge of certain
earthly strains in his goddess.

The colours faded from the water, and it blackened.

As they walked on side by side in the twilight, a consciousness of
repressed masculine force, of reserve power, which she had never before
felt about Peter Erwin, invaded her; and she was seized with a strange
uneasiness. Ridiculous was the thought (which she lost no time in
rejecting) that pointed out the true road to happiness in marrying such a
man as he. In the gathering darkness she slipped her hand through his
arm.

"I wish I could marry you, Peter," she said.

He was fain to take what comfort he could from this expression of
good-will. If he was not the Prince Charming of her dreams, she would
have liked him to be. A little reflection on his part ought to have shown
him the absurdity of the Prince Charming having been there all the time,
and in ready-made clothes. And he, too, may have had dreams. We are not
concerned with them.

............................

If we listen to the still, small voice of realism,