"Not if I dare?" she retorted gently. "Not if I dare, who am a coward? Are you a coward, too, that when you have said so much and I have said so much you will still leave me alone and unprotected, and--and friendless? Or is it that you do not love me?" "Not love you?" Roger cried, in a tone that betrayed more than a volume of words had told. And beaten out of his last defence by that shrewd dilemma, he threw his pride to the winds; he sank down beside her, and seized her hands and carried them to his lips--lips that were hot with the fever of sudden passion. "Not love you, mademoiselle? Not love you?" "So eloquent!" she murmured, with a last flicker of irony. "He does not even now say that he loves me. It is still his friendship, I suppose, that he offers me." "Mademoiselle!" "Or is it that you think me a nun because I wear this dress?" He convinced her by means more eloquent than all the words lovers' lips have framed that he did not so think her; that she was the heart of his heart, the desire of his desire. Not that she needed to be convinced. For when the delirium of his joy began to subside he ventured to put a certain question to her--that question which happy lovers never fail to put. "Do you think women are blind?" she answered. "Did you think I did not see your big eyes following me in and out and up and down? That I did not see your blush when I spoke to you and your black brow when I walked with M. des Ageaux? Dear Roger, women are not so blind! I was not so blind that I did not know as much before you spoke as I know now." And in the dark of the wood they talked, while the water glinted slowly by them and the frogs croaked among the waving weeds, and in the stillness under the trees the warmth of the summer night and of love wrapped them round. It was an hour between danger and danger, made more precious by uncertainty. For the moment the world held for each of them but one other person. The Lieutenant's peril, Bonne's suspense, the Abbess--all were forgotten until the moon rose above the trees and flung a chequered light on the dark moss and hart's-tongue and harebells about the lovers' feet. And with a shock of self-reproach the two rose to their feet.