But Winnie herself had genuine power to stir his heart--and now, indeed, as never before, since she seemed helpless save for him, and hopeless save in him, yet in and through him both brave and confident--the most profound, the most powerful, flattery from sex to sex. Mere friends could not help now; mere convictions, a naked sense of being in the right, would not avail. These she had, but she must have love too. To this mood all the man in him responded. "It only needed this final trouble to--to make me speak." "I don't think I need speak," she whispered, with her delicately quavering smile. "You know it all--all the great thing it is. I'm not ashamed of it, Godfrey. And you won't be ashamed of me, will you?" The question did not disconcert him now. For the time he had lost that vision of the future which had once disquieted and alarmed him. His phrases might be well-worn, but they were heartily sincere when he told her he would face the world, if only she were by his side. "It shall all be just as you said you wished it to be, if ever you joined your life to a man's again." He quoted almost verbally, just missing her poetic "link." Winnie kissed him in warm and pretty gratitude. "That takes away my last doubt," she told him. "I shall be proud now, as proud as any woman! And to-day--just for a few hours--let's forget everything, except that we're plighted lovers." She put her arm through his. "You'll kill the giant, take his ring, and mend the Princess' Broken Heart!" "I say, are you making me a Prince in disguise, Winnie?" "Well, don't you feel like a Prince now?" she asked, with the sweet audacity of a woman who knows that she is loved, and for her lover boldly takes herself at her lover's valuation. Obedient to her wish, the outside world effected one of its disappearances--very obliging, if not of long duration. Even Woburn Square made tactful exit, without posing the question as to what its opinion of the proceedings might likely be. Of course, that point could be held immaterial for the present at least. For the second time then, in Winnie Maxon's recent experience, with a little courage things proved easy; difficulties vanished when faced; you did what you held you had a right to do, and nothing terrible happened. Certainly nothing terrible happened that evening at Shaylor's Patch. There was a romantic, an idyllic, bit of courting, with the man ardent and gallant, the woman gay but shy; it was all along orthodox lines, really conventional. He had undertaken that the affair should be carried through on Winnie's lines; this was his great and fine concession--or conversion. He observed it most honourably; she grew more and more gratefully tender. "Another man than you--yes, even another man I loved--might have wounded me to-night," she murmured, as they parted at the door after dinner. "I could never wound you--even with my love." She took his hand and kissed it. "I'm trusting you against all the world, Godfrey."