"Not until I've said the rest of it," he said, looking over his shoulder. Then, with fierce eagerness, drawing closer to her: "I adored you when you were eight. You may call it boyish impulse or whatever you like. Be that as it may, I've never loved any one else. A hundred times I've tried to picture the face, the form, the character of the girl I'd really come to love. Always there came to my mind a face--not a child's face, but a child's face grown to a woman's. It was always the same. The face of the little girl who grew up in my brain without being observed--without a sign that she was there. When she was fifteen, she was fifteen to my dreams; when she was twenty, I imagined her as such. She grew up with me. Every year I saw the change in the girl I pictured as the one I could love. No other came up to that ideal. There could be no other, for there was a real girl there all the time. I loved you years ago, Mary Pembroke, and I must tell you that--" "Oh, you mustn't say it--you mustn't!" she cried, tremulously, putting out her hand. "It--it doesn't seem real--it wouldn't seem honest. Please, please don't treat it lightly. Don't spoil it all by--" "I never was so serious," he said. "I--I didn't mean to shock you. It must sound foolish to you. Of course, I've never meant anything to you. It's all on my side. I've been too abrupt. I've been an awful ass to blurt it out to you so soon. Why, you can't help looking upon me as a total stranger. You haven't thought of me in years and years." "Oh, I haven't forgotten the spindle-shanked boy," she said in a very low voice. "You may not have known it, my friend, but I was very deeply in love with you in the days of the old _Campania_. I was--" "You were! You really were?" he cried, with difficulty reducing it to a half whisper. "I was a very impressionable child," she said, regaining all of her lost ground as only a woman can when carried to the last extremity. "And--and I _may_ have a chance even now?" he cried, his eyes gleaming. She pushed the swing-door open with her elbow and demurely held it ajar for him, a soft smile on her lips that he did not then understand and never was to understand, being a male. "You are Santa Claus, not Romeo," she said. He also missed the flutter in her voice and entirely overlooked the fact that she was breathing quickly. He followed her into the dining-room, strangely subdued. They came by the light of a window. There, with an impulsive gesture and a quick laugh, she halted him. Her amused eyes were taking in his tumbled hair. "Wait," she said. "Do you mind if I pick some of the cotton out of your hair?" "Not at all," he said with alacrity.