“You say you don’t trust me. Well, I will show you I can be trusted. I have never cared enough before. Is that altogether my fault? I care enough now, and I will show you. Is it that alone that stands between us? If you could trust me, you would let yourself go? Paddy!”—he moved suddenly nearer, and looked squarely into her eyes—“just as if I didn’t know that under ordinary circumstances I should win you easily enough. I’m not bragging. Heaven knows I’ve faults enough, but bragging is not among them. It’s because, somehow, I know that under ordinary circumstances it would be natural for your love to surrender to mine, before anyone else you know, that I snap my fingers when you protest that you hate me, and refuse to be daunted. If I could slay the spectre between us, and show you that I was to be trusted, would you marry me?” Paddy looked hard at the loch, and said, “No.” “Why not?” “When I have said a thing, I have said it. I will not marry you, because I hate you.” “Now you are merely absurd. Why do you hate me?” “Because I cannot forget the past.” He gave an impatient gesture. “Heroics! Heroics!—_you_ were never hurt. I tell you it is a spectre, and you ought to have the sense to slay it. Instead, you enlarge on it—positively drape it in visionary attributes, and offer yourself as a sort of burnt offering to it. You ought to have lived a few hundred years ago. By Gad! Paddy, you’d have made a fine Joan of Arc!” and he laughed with a touch of bitterness. Paddy stared at the loch and remained silent. “Patricia the Great at the head of an avenging army—leading on fools and knights-errant—devastating a peaceful, harmless land for the sake of a Dream—a Prejudice—a Chimera. I see it all.” She looked helplessly unhappy, but he would not spare her. “Listen to me, Patricia the Great. You shall keep your feud, and cling to your prejudice a little longer, but _I will not give in_. I want you. That at least is a plain, ungarnished truth. Perhaps if you knew me as well as some, you would realise that it is the sort of truth I have a little habit of making into a fact, in spite of dreams and prejudices. This thing has got to be, Paddy. I repeat what I said before. If I am worth my name, I will win you yet.” “Ah, why will you talk like this, when it is so useless,” she cried. “Why will you not be friends? Lawrence, let us be friends. Let me thank you for the other night, and, for the sake of it, drop the old feud. I will try to do this to show you I am sincere in my gratitude.”