'So you are enjoying yourself,' said Peter at last--Peter who never made fatuous conversational remarks of this sort. The words, for no reason in themselves, fell oddly, and were followed by a silence which was disturbing and made for sudden self-consciousness wholly to be condemned, and to be banished, if possible, directly. Jane, who did not fidget aimlessly with things, began diligently to pluck a long white feather out of her fan, and said in a voice that was deliberately commonplace, 'We ought to go back now, oughtn't we? Let me see who your next partner is, Peter, that I may send you back to dance with her.' She stretched out her hand for the young man's programme. But Peter sat absorbed, twisting its silk cord round his finger. 'Don't let's go yet,' he said, and the constrained silence fell between them again. 'I want to ask you something, Jane.' 'Yes,' said Jane. Her hands lay idle now in her lap, and she no longer tried to extract the white ostrich feather from her fan. 'I want to know if you think you can care for me a little?' Probably when a man feels most deeply his utterances are the most commonplace, and an Englishman is proverbially incapable of expressing his feelings. In the supreme moments of their lives, it is true, a few men, and those not always the most sincere, may speak eloquently; but for the most part a proposal of marriage from an Englishman is--as it should be--a clumsy thing. Peter Ogilvie could only speak in such limited language as he always used. Yet the world seemed to stand still for him just then, for he knew that everything in his heaven or upon earth depended on what Jane's answer would be. 'Don't let me bother you,' he said at last, 'or rush you into giving an answer now if you would rather wait.' Perhaps a declaration of love from an old comrade is the most dear as well as the most embarrassing of all such avowals. A heart which has already given itself in loyalty and affection to another finds that it is not a deepening of this loyalty and affection that is asked, but a complete re-ordering of things. The lover's petition, therefore, either comes to the woman as a revelation, betraying to her in a flash that she has loved always, and has merely been calling the thing by another name, or else it finds her impatient at the disturbance of an old comradeship, a cherished friendship, which nothing but this foolish, exacting thing called love could ever shake. Peter was not versed in introspective questions or hair-splittings; he loved with his whole heart, and he had tried to say so without very much success. Just then he would have given anything he possessed to be endowed with a little more eloquence, though deep down in his heart he had a lingering hope that perhaps Jane would understand. 'It's neck or nothing,' he was saying to himself, in the homely jargon in which he usually formed his thoughts. 'God knows I may have been a fool to speak.'