“Oh, come, now, Miss Carrington,” laughed Helen. “I play the game with you, cards face up on the table. You are the sort of woman with whom one can do that; you can’t with most of them. I’m not in love with Kit sentimentally; there isn’t a drop of the Elizabeth Barrett Browning slush in it! What’s that thing she wrote? ‛Unless you can muse in a crowd on the face that fixed you?’ Heavens! When I’m in the midst of a crowd I’m busy seeing to it that it knows I’m there! And no face ever fixed me--sounds like a spitted chicken! Stuff! If I get Kit--and I mean to--I’ll be as pleased as Punch, and so shall he, I promise you. But if I don’t get him I’ll take someone else and make a good thing of it. What I won’t do is to fail in life. I want Kit, do you see? He suits me; I want him. I like all the things about him that I enumerated, and then some. Simply and truthfully, I want Kit. We’d make a corking pair. He’s good material. As far as this is worth, I am in love with Kit. But you and I are wide-awake women, with the right labels on ourselves and our world, only I’m beginning to think I’m the elder, you nice old Anne Carrington! Help me to capture your boy and we’ll never repent it, you nor I, nor that silly Christopher, who thinks, or will think if we don’t straighten his thoughts for him, that he wants that demure mouse! She would make him gruel, possibly, but she would surely make any clever man who had to put up with her monotony sick to the point of needing gruel! She’s just the average woman since Eve, Aunt Anne!” “There’s no such thing as an average woman, Helen Abercrombie!” laughed Miss Carrington. “Untold millions of them since Eve, and every one of them a special creation--ending with you, who are, I confess, the least average of any I have known.” Helen laughed with her and said: “Helen fired Troy; it’s queer if she can’t set Kit afire. See here, Miss Carrington, why aren’t we riding, Kit and I? Don’t you know that on a horse I inevitably ride to victory?” “I’ll have them here in the morning, Helen,” said Miss Carrington. “Make Kit start early enough to ride to the Daphne Woods. It’s the most exquisite, the most emotional road I’ve ever seen, here or abroad.” “Its name is all of that; I remember it from other visits. I always thought there must have been a poet here before Mr. Latham’s time to name those woods. All right; Daphne Woods it shall be for Kit and me to-morrow morning. And thanks, Miss Carrington, for this satisfactory confession I’ve made. Do I understand that I am shriven?” Helen asked, rising. “Of what you intend to do? Even an old pagan like me knows that you can’t be shriven of an intention to act, unless you give up the intention. And I hope you will not abandon your plan to steal Kit!”