He wished to heaven she would wake up. While he fumed and fretted, he built topply air-castles. Couldn’t he marry her--propose clean off the bat and get it over? Such things had happened. The idea allured him. He began to reckon his finances to see whether he could afford it. He had saved seven hundred pounds from his Beauty Incorporated dividends; every year there would be three hundred more. Then he had his future. His work was in demand. Several commissions had been offered him. No fiction-writer since Du Maurier, so the critics told him, had illustrated his own stories quite so happily. His next book was going to make him famous--he was sure of it. Oh, yes, so far as money went, he was eligible. From somewhere at the back of his mind a wise voice kept warning: “You have to live all your life with a woman; marrying’s the least part of marriage. Go slowly. How d’you know that she isn’t another Fluffy?” It was just as though Mrs. Sheerug were talking. He argued angrily against her disillusions. “But she’s not selfish like Vashti; and, anyway, you weren’t fair to Vashti. You wouldn’t believe that she was good--you wouldn’t even let Hal believe it. That was why he lost her.” Then Madame Josephine took a hand: “When you find her, don’t try to change her. Women long to be trusted. Be content to love.” He gasped. What a lot Madame Josephine knew about men and women. He was doing what all men did--and he had promised himself so faithfully to be the exception. Already he was wanting to change Desire: wanting to make her give up such friends as Fluffy; wishing she didn’t smoke cigarettes, though so long as she wasn’t married to him he found it rather fascinating; feeling shocked that she had trusted a strange man so carelessly, though, when he happened to be her chance-selected companion, he had been glad to profit by her carelessness. And then--he didn’t like to own it--he felt piqued by her lack of curiosity. She had taken him so quietly for granted. She hadn’t asked who he was, or why he, of all men, had been sent to her rescue. Any man would have done, provided he had had a car. It was A Man with A Car that she had wanted. When the emergency was ended and he had served his purpose, she would dismiss him with a polite “Thank you,” and put him out of her memory. Thistledown--that was what she was. He bent over her. Still sleeping! Her red lips were parted, the glint of her white teeth showing. One hand was beneath her cheek, the other against her breast like a crumpled petal. Below her eyes the long lashes made shadows. How sweet she was, how fragile, how trusting--how like the child-Desire who had snuggled into his arms in the woodland! With a sudden revulsion he despised his fault-finding. Chivalry and tenderness leapt up. He must make it a law with himself to believe the highest of her, whatever happened or had happened.