"Oh, you're a strange little girl, Smiles. I had not realized that you were fully grown up until to-night; but now I know that you are a woman,--a child no longer. My little Rose would never have tried to be so dramatic, nor would she have tried to analyze her love, and label it the call of kin, rather than that of a mate. I used to think that you were a clear crystal in which I might see reflected your very heart and soul, but now you have become a woman and therefore a mystery. Oh, woman, what do you know about love? Not the kind that Philip inspired in you; but the name which burns unquenchable--which purifies and strengthens, or consumes the one who ..." he stopped, surprised at his own rush of words,--and abashed. The hand, which she had slipped unconsciously into his, trembled and thrilled him. "Perhaps ... I do ... know it, Donald," came the words, barely audible. "Smiles! It isn't possible that you ... that I ... Oh, my dear one, don't say anything to make me hope anew, after what I have endured to-night unless ..." "Do you really care, Don? In that _other_ way, I mean." He stood unsteadily up; things had become unreal and he could not speak. Smiles, still holding his hand, rose also. The top of her head came just below the level of his eyes; the moonlight across it set her wavy hair to shimmering. She could not lift her eyes to his, but with a brave, low voice, she went on, when she saw that he would not answer. "All this past week I have been the most brazen of girls, and deliberately given you a hundred chances to tell me, if it were so. I was quite sure that it couldn't be, and besides, you told Philip...." "I know; but I thought ... you see he told me that he loved you, and that he was sure that you cared for him." "I did, just as I do now. Oh, man, you have been so blind, or so noble. Have I got to _ask_ you to marry me?" For the barest instant she looked up at him, and he saw that the smile he loved was whimsical as well as madly appealing. "No," almost shouted Donald. "I won't hear of such a thing as your being one of these 'new women.' You're a siren out of the olden days of mystic legend, and I have kept my ears stopped up against your witching song, which I was afraid to hear. But now I want to hear it, day and night, through eternity. Wait, not yet. First ... Smiles, will you marry me?" "Oh, what an anticlimax! Why did you have to become so practical and unromantic, after such a splendid start," she laughed happily. "No lover is supposed to ask that question with such brutal bluntness. Come, I will teach you the romance of love." It was dark on the veranda. The moon had suddenly slipped out of sight behind one of the laggards in the retreating cloud army; but Donald needed no earthly light in order to realize that Rose was holding out her arms to him, as simply and frankly as she had five years before. "Chir-r-r-p, chir-r-r-p, chir-r-r-p," thrilled the cricket underneath the porch. CHAPTER XXXIV