"No," said Dick, "I won't have it. Put that in your pipe and smoke it. You little devil! I believe you do it to work me up. That's all right if it stopped there. But it won't. Some day he'll hear you and then----!" She was flaming again. "Hear me? Hear me call him darling? Why, he's heard it so often it's no more to him than your calling him Jack. But if he asked me what I meant by it! do you know what would happen then?" "What would?" "Then," said Nan enigmatically, "I should tell him, that's all." She would say no more, though he hurled questions at her, and hardly remembered afterward what they were. He was of an impression that he begged her to love him, to marry him, though Dick, prodigal as he was of great words in his verse, scarcely believed he used them in the direct address of love-making. But certainly he did beg her, and Nan was gentle with him, though always, like Tira, as she remembered afterward, repeating, "No! no!" At the end, his passion softened into something appealing, as if they were together considering the sad case he found himself in and he depended on her to help him through. "Nan," he said, in the boyish way she loved, "don't you see it's got to be in the end? We've always been together. We're always going to be. Don't you see, old Nan?" Nan smiled at him, brilliantly, cruelly, he thought. But she was sorry for him, and it was only a show of cruelty. It came out of her kindness, really. Dick mustn't suffer so for want of her. Bully him, abuse him, anything to anger him and keep him from sheer weak, unavailing regret. Nan had a great idea of what men should be: "tough as a knot," she thought, seasoned all through. If they whimpered, she was aghast. "No," she said again, with the brilliant smile, "no! no! I can't. I won't. Not unless"--and this, too, was calculated cruelty--"unless Rookie tells me to." They sat staring at each other as if each wondered what the outcome was to be. Nan was excitedly ready for it. Or had the last word been actually said? But Dick altogether surprised her. He got up and stood looking down at her in a dignity she found new to him. "When you come to me," he said, "you'll come because I ask you. It won't be because any other man tells you to." He walked past her, out of the room. Did he, Nan wondered, in her ingenuous surprise, look a very little like Rookie? When he was twenty years older, was he going to look as Rookie did now? His expression, that is. For, after all, there was Dick's nose.