"We sat without speaking for a few minutes, and then he suggested that we had better go and look for our companions. "After wandering about for some little time we found them comfortably reclining against a buttress on one of the towers. As we went up the winding steps we could hear them talking about the view. Amy, I thought, had evidently less occasion for a chaperon than had her qualified protector; but I was more doubtful about this point after having seen her face, which was flushed and showed signs of an unusual, though suppressed, excitement. The Major has proposed, I thought. "I had no opportunity of finding out if this surmise were correct till I went up to our room that evening; and even then Amy, instead of answering my question, at first persisted in hearing what Captain Frint had been saying to me. "’He looked like a ghost when you came up,’ she said; ’whatever had you been doing to the poor man?’ "So I had to tell her, and was glad to find that she quite approved of my action, saying that it would have been a great mistake if I had let him go, and that it was only fair to punish him for his impertinence by a little extra tantalization. "’If he had gone,’ she said, ’he would have soon forgotten and taken up with some one else. Now you can keep him miserable as long as you like, for he is a safe man, you see, even as I told you.’ "I should have felt disposed to argue the point, for her way of speaking annoyed me, but at the moment I was too anxious to hear her experience, so I said that it was her turn now to explain. "’There is not very much to tell,’ she answered; ’you came up at rather an inconvenient moment. Our friend had been giving me a long discourse on love, which rather perplexed me. At last he became more personal, and was saying that he loved me to distraction, but that for some reason he dared not at the moment ask my love in return--when we heard your footsteps down below, and he at once changed the subject.’ "’I am sorry we came so soon,’ I said. ’What did he mean, I wonder?’ "’That is the curious part of it,’ said Amy. And we spent half-an-hour trying to make various guesses, but not one of them came near to the mark, as we discovered later on. "As time passed, I grew more and more annoyed with my admirer. He was polite, respectful, and reserved, but decidedly uninteresting, and evidently so afraid of falling again, and showing his love for me, that he became stiff and formal the moment we were alone together. "Why, I thought, cannot men be more reasonable? There surely is some line between frigidity and fire. Moreover, as I got over my alarm at his first outburst of affection, I began rather to desire some sign of my influence, and even tried now and again to break through his reserve by indirect reference to what had passed between us, but for some time without avail. "This piqued me, and one evening when we were alone together, I was seized with a mad impulse to make him break his promise.