Nan said nothing for a minute. She was trying to see his hands, and he showed her with a shrug the only finger that was still in rags. His wounds had not been serious; he was scarcely walking lame; the scratches had skinned over on his face. She could look in it again, steadfastly, simply; she was even beginning to like it better between a wide-awake and an open throat than in the spruce cap and collar of the voyage. Her own scarlet she had conquered in a tithe of the time it had often taken her in secret: it was not so dreadful to be with him after all. And if he loved her nothing mattered: not even her long agony in the ti-tree thicket. Yet he had hurt her by belittling himself, and by something else of which his last words reminded Nan. "But you don't look on it as luck. You aren't a bit glad you saved my life!" And her eyes fell once more, if this time not involuntarily. "Glad!" he cried out. "Gladness is no word for my feeling about that--for what I feel every moment of every hour." "Yet you wish it had been some one else." "I don't!" "But you said you did, Denis." "Well, and I have felt it, too, when I couldn't send you a single message--couldn't make a single sign--for fear you should think--for fear you should misunderstand!" Nan had not raised her eyes again; his tone made it difficult now. He was leaning toward her, almost bending over her, and yet his foot clung to the pine-stump as though by conscious effort of the will, and his face was a fight between set jaw and yearning eyes. But Nan could not see his face; she could only see the sunlight and the shadows in the lavender skirts that spread about her as she sat, and a few inches of hard yellow ground beyond. She was beginning to believe in his love, to understand his position before he explained it to her, to see the end of her own doubts. His halting voice was more eloquent than many words. And yet for words she was constrained to probe. "So you determined to go up to the diggings?" "I did." "And to leave me?" "Nan, I must." His voice reconciled her more and more. "Must you, Denis?" "To make some money, Nan dear! And I will make it--I will--I will!" She felt that he would. His voice only stirred her now. "And then?" she asked. "And then," he cried, "and then I sha'n't mind pressing you for an answer to what I dared to ask you on the _North Foreland_." There was a silence in the little clearing among the young pines. Only near at hand the hum of insects, and in the distance a cloud of cockatoos shrieking the sun into the sea, and the sea itself faintly booming upon the base of the sandstone cliffs. Before either spoke there was indeed one other sound, but it fell on ears doubly deaf; for Nan had flung back her dark-gold ringlets in a way of hers, and from the bold pose of her head none could have imagined the warm bloom upon her cheeks, or the tender film that dimmed the hazel eyes. "Suppose I prefer to give you your answer first?"