Peter could not let her go on. He put out his quick, clever hands in an eager gesture, as if he pushed something away. "Ah," he said, "I don't want to be patient! I want to be rash. I don't want anything back. I want something new and beautiful. I want to tell you a million things in a minute--chiefly how much I love you." His voice had deepened. It swept her on apace, in spite of herself, because it was like Osmond's. For a moment she felt the kinship between them, the same swift blood, the picturesque betrayals. There was something at the heart of each that was dear to her, and Peter, for the moment, speaking in the sunshine with her eyes upon him, was also the voice out of the dark. But she had nevertheless to recall him. "Have you really given each other up?" she asked. "Yes," said Peter, in the same glad acquiescence. "And what do you think she told me, the last thing of all?" She shook her head. "She told me I loved you. And I do, Rose. Oh, I do! I do!" "But that mustn't part you. Think what it is to me--to know my coming here has done it." "Oh, you had to come!" said Peter light-heartedly. "It was preordained. It's destiny. I was a fool not to see it the first minute. She had to tell me." Rose, in spite of herself, smiled a little. But her thoughts settled gravely back upon her own hard task. "Did she tell you"--She hesitated, and then asked her question with a simple directness. "Did she tell you how much mistaken you are in me?" "Please don't," said Peter. His face flushed. He looked his misery. "You see she is the only one who was not mistaken in me. Those of you who believed in me--well, I must tell all of you. Even grannie, dear grannie! I am afraid--" She stopped because she meant to show no emotion; but it seemed to her that grannie, in her guarded life, must view her harshly. "I was wrong, Peter, ever to let you mix yourself in this miserable coil. If I could lie, well and good. Let me do it and take the consequences. But I should have known better than to bring you into it." Peter stood thoughtfully regarding her in a very impersonal way, as if he debated how she could be moved. "I wonder," he said at last, "how it is possible to tell you how lovely you are to everybody, how perfectly splendid, you know, quite different from anybody else! And when you add to that that you've been wronged and--and insulted--oh you've simply no conception how it makes a fellow feel! Why, I adore you, that's all. I just adore you." He stretched out his hand like a bluff comrade and she put hers into it as frankly. "You're a dear boy, Peter," she said, and her eyes were wet. He spoke perversely, when she had taken her hand away:-- "That's all very well, you know, but I'm not a boy--not all the time. I love you awfully, Rose, in the real way, the bang-up old style, Tristan and all that, you know. I'm going to keep on and you'll have to listen."