'Oh, but that won't be at all the same!' Dick answered, trembling. 'They'll all be men, you see.' And then he paused, wondering whether perhaps he had spoken too plainly. Mary's pace by this time had become almost unladylike, so fast was she walking. Still, just to break the awkward silence which followed Dick's last words, she felt compelled to say something. 'You'll meet plenty of girls, too, I expect,' she interposed nervously. 'Perhaps; but they won't be _you_,' Dick blurted out with a timid gasp, gazing straight into her eyes; and then recoiled, aghast, at his own exceeding temerity. Mary blushed again and cast down her eyes. 'Don't let me take you out of your way any farther,' she said after another short pause, just to cover her confusion. 'I really _must_ get back now. Mrs. Tradescant'll be so angry.' 'Oh no; you can't go just yet!' Dick cried, growing desperate, and standing half across the path, with a man's masterful eagerness. 'Now I've once begun with it, I must say my say out to you. Miss Tudor, that very first day I ever saw you, I thought a great deal of you. You could tell I did by the mere fact that I took the trouble to make such a fool of myself over that unhappy book-cover. But the more I've seen of you, the better I've liked you. Liked you, oh, so much I can hardly tell you! And when I went up to Oxford about this Scholarship, which has given me a start in life, I thought about you so often that I really believe I owe my success in great part to you. Now, what I want to say before I go'--he paused and hesitated; it was so hard to word it--'what I want to say's just this. Perhaps you'll think it presumptuous of me; but do you feel, if I get on, and recover the place in the world that belongs by right to my family--do you feel as if there's any chance you might ever be able to care for me?' He jerked it out, all trembling. Mary trembled herself, and hardly knew what to answer; for though she liked the young man very much--more than any other young man she'd ever yet met--she hadn't thought of him to herself in this light exactly--at least, not very often. So she stood for a moment in the corner of the path by that bend in the field where the hedge hides and shelters one, and replied diplomatically, with sound feminine common-sense, though with a quiver in her voice: 'Don't you think, Mr. Plantagenet, it's a little bit premature for you to talk of these things when you're only just going up to Oxford? For your own sake, you know, and your family's too, you ought to leave yourself as free and untrammelled as possible: you oughtn't to burden yourself beforehand with uncertainties and complications.' Dick looked at her half reproachfully. 'Oh, Miss Tudor!' he cried, drawing back quite seriously, 'I wouldn't allow anybody else in the world to call you a complication.'