She bowed her head still lower, and Vane took her hand again and held it for a moment. He left in it the old lace handkerchief, still burned at the edges. "When you send it back to me, I shall know what it means," he said, and kissed it. "But while you still keep it, I shall hope." "Oh, I am wrong in saying this," she sighed. "I may never care for you. And yet in certain ways I care for you so much. It seems sometimes to me that I have no heart. I don't think I am worthy of you." She took the handkerchief and put it in her pocket. XXIV. THEY walked back together. Vane felt a year removed from the happenings of the last week, from Miss Morse, from all the others. It seemed as if the painted hotel were to vanish, like a stage-setting, and he were back in Carcassonne or Monserrat, back with her. All the genuine life that he had missed so long was his: the earnestness, the simplicity of olden times. Now no longer he asked himself what there was in America for him to do. In all this there was nothing sentimental; it was natural, real, radical. That he ever could have doubted that he was in love! What he felt for Winifred was passion, not sentiment, and he gloried in it; it was because she was a woman, after all, and he a man, and he knew now that he should win her. There was a certain splendid excitement about Vane's life that autumn. It was all so real to him now. The solution had come of itself. He was not yet her lover, formally accepted, but he felt that he was her lover in fact and truth. He was continually with her; following her to Newport when she went there for a month, late in October. She not only suffered him to be with her; she suffered him (as a woman may, impalpably) to love her; even, now and then, to show his love for her, as when he took her hand, or walked with her in autumn evenings by the sea. Now and then she would repulse him, telling him that he must not be confident of her; that it was only to be after many years; but her repulses grew fainter and less frequent. It did not, even then, seem to Vane as if he were teaching her to love; she was too sympathetic; she felt too quickly and too closely every impulse of his own; his passion was too readily reflected in the flush or paleness of her face. Rather was she herself the mistress, Vane the scholar. Nothing he said or sighed seemed to take her by surprise, to be unappreciated by her. He augured well from this.