Phil had long ago told himself that he loved Queenie with more than a cousin’s love, and had only been deterred from telling her so by her fitful moods, sometimes all sunshine, sometimes all storm. But now he surely might speak with the full assurance of a favorable answer, for what but this could her manner mean, and her assertion that they could not live apart. She loved him, he was certain; and with his arm around her, he began rapidly and impetuously to tell her how inexpressibly dear she was to him, and to speak of the future when she would be his wife, as if everything were understood and settled between them. “We will never quarrel then, will we, darling?” he said. “I should not like to see a frown on my wife’s face, and know it was meant for me, and I will be so good and loving that you will not wish to call me a bore, and send me away from you. And we will be married at once. You need a husband to care for you, and there is no reason why we should wait a day. I will tell mother to-night, and she will be so glad, and so will Ethel and Grace, for they all love you dearly. Why don’t you speak to me, Queenie?” he said, as she did not answer him, but sat like one dead to all sense of speech or hearing. “Why, Queenie, what is the matter? How white you are,” he continued, as he stooped at last to look into the face, which was pale as ashes, with an expression of pain, and even horror, upon it, which he could not understand. “Oh, Phil, you have killed me,” Queenie said, at last, as she released herself from him and moved to another rock, where she sat down and looked at him with eyes from which the hot tears were falling like rain. “Killed you, Queenie!” Phil cried. “How could I kill you by telling you that I loved you, when you must have known it already? Surely, surely, you have not been deceiving me all this time—not been leading me on to believe you loved me, just as I love you, only to mock me at the last? That would be cruel, indeed.” And this he said because of something in her face and eyes which filled him with dread and fear. “Oh, Phil,” Queenie replied, beating the air with her hands, as she always did when excited, “if my conscience reproved me one whit, and said I had purposely misled you for my own amusement, I would drown myself in Lake Petit, but I have not, I certainly have not. I thought——” “You thought,” Phil interrupted her, as she hesitated a moment—“thought what? That I was a stock—a stone to be unmoved by your beauty and sweetness, and—I will say it—your wiles and witcheries, which, if they meant nothing, were damnable, to say the least, and prove you to be the most heartless coquette that ever breathed. Girls do not usually write notes to men such as you have written me, begging them to come back, and then, when they go, receive them as you have received me, without meaning something, and if you do not mean marriage, may I ask what you do mean?”