She played with the handkerchief on her lap. "It seems so familiar. Honestly, Ronnie, aren't you rather--what is the word? The book you lent me--a play?" "A philanderer?" suggested the other. "My dear child, how silly you are. Of course I'm not. Very few people have impressed me as you have. It must have been fate that took me into Burts--I never go into shops, but François--that's my man--" "I know him," she nodded, "he often comes in. I used to wonder who he was." "He was out and I wanted--I forget what it was I wanted, even forget whether I bought it. I must have done, otherwise I should not have found myself staring over a paydesk at the most lovely girl in all the world." She laughed, a gurgling laugh of sheer happiness, and looked at him swiftly before she dropped her eyes again. "I like to hear that," she said softly. "It is so wonderful--that you like me, I mean. Because I'm nothing, really. And you, you're a--well, gentleman. I know you hate the word, but you are. Miles and miles above me. Why, I live in a miserable little house in a horrible neighborhood--full of thieves and terrible creatures who drink. And my mother does odd jobs for people. And I'm not very well educated--really. I can read and write, but I'm not half so clever as Christina, that is my sister. She's an invalid and reads all day and all night too, if I'd let her." He was watching her as she spoke. The play of color in her pretty face, the rise and fall of her narrow chest, the curve of chin and the velvet smoothness of her throat--he marked them all with the eye of the gourmet who watches lambs frisking in the pasture and sees, not the poetry and beauty of young life, but a likeable dish that will one day mature. "If you were a beggar-maid and I were a prince"--he began. "I'm not much better, am I?" she asked ruefully, "and you are a prince, to me, Ronnie--" She was thinking. "Yes?" "How can anything come right for us? I don't want to think about it and I try ever so hard to keep it out of my thoughts. I'm so happy--meeting you--and loving you--and tomorrow never comes, but--" "You mean how will this dear friendship end?" She nodded. "How would you like it to end?" Evie Colebrook poked the furrel of her sunshade into the grass and turned up a tuft of clover. "There is only one way it can ever end--happily," she said in a low voice, "and that is--well you know, Ronnie." He laughed. "With you in a beautiful white dress and a beautiful white veil and a wreath of orange blossoms round your glorious hair, and a fat and nasty old man in a surplice reading a few passages from a book; and people leering at you as you go down the aisle and saying--well, you know what they say. I think a wedding is the most indelicate function which society affects." She said nothing, but continued prodding at the turf. "It can be done quietly," she said at last.