She did, and she did not. She stared at him: her uncovered gold head almost on a level with his own fair head, crested by that flyer's cap. "Yes, rather!" continued the lad, definitely. "Now, what about it?" He held out a hand to help her up the dunes, but she climbed as lightly as he. "What about it, please?" he repeated. "What about your belonging to me for keeps, I mean?" The girl had a curious little gesture as she looked at him, then away. Surprise was in it, and protest, and a virginal dignity; also amusement, unpreparedness, and wonder.... She repeated his words. "'Belong' to you? To you? Oh! No, I----" "Don't you like me?" he shot out. "Oh! I like you very well," she answered quickly, almost hurt herself by the thought that she might have hurt him. "I like you so well! I like to be with you. I like to talk to you. I--yes, I like to look at you," and she turned one of her frank and friendly glances upon that handsome figure striding by her side, that fresh face, all pink in the sea-breezes. "But I guess I'd never want to 'belong' to any man!" He smiled into the sweet bewildered eyes. It was the smiling side of his obstinacy; obstinate and keen again, in love as in war! "I say----How old are you?" he asked. "Twenty-one," she told him. "Well, then! You don't mind my asking, do you? Hasn't any man ever wanted you to belong to him before?" "You mean asked me to marry them?" "Yes." "Why, yes," she admitted with her crystal straightness. "Men, proposed to me? Why, stacks of them! But they didn't do it that way." She looked back and out to sea, as though she could see on the other side of that severing Atlantic the half-score of her splendid young countrymen who had offered her marriage as tribute is offered to a young queen. "You are--queer people over here," she said softly. "Queer?" "The way you talk of 'belonging.'" "Queer, if it's the right man and the girl he wants?" Jack Awdas asked. "But," she said, sweet and stately, "I should always want to belong to myself." Then he understood. He said quickly, "Of course I'd always want that for you, too. But--oh, look here! Would the other stop that? As I see it, it might help it." The puzzled wonder grew in her look. All this was strange to her; she had read of it, heard of it. All this was unexpectedly different from books, from college, from life until now. The old was so unexplored to the new, embodied in its modern Diana. At twenty she had seen half the capitals of two hemispheres, yet she was in his eyes more backward in some ways than a girl who had never left her native village. Mrs. Cartwright could have told her that it is by "belonging" that a woman forms her individuality, and that it is only by giving that she can either gain or keep what she has.