"I didn't!" "What?" Captain Ross thrust out his jaw. "You ought to know me well enough by this time. You've seen me plenty." "Yes," said Olwen, with feeling, "and always being----" "Well?" "Perfectly horrid to me." "'Horrid,' you think?" barked Captain Ross. "In the office? You don't understand that I'm as much on active service there behind a pen as I was when I was able to be behind a gun? 'Horrid.' Because I didn't make love to you there, and both of us on duty? If you imagine that I'm the kind of man who'd do that ever, I am afraid you are under a serious misapprehen----" "But you weren't always in the office," protested Olwen, quickly, "and you were _always_ horrid to me!" "When, please?" "Well, at lunch!" "Because I only had lunch with you once a week?" "You didn't 'have lunch _with_ me,'" Olwen demurely reminded him. "You happened to be lunching at the same place on Fridays." "That's hair-splitting," snapped Captain Ross. Exactly as if he never split hairs! As if he had not been splitting hairs for the last six months. That is, the same hair. And with a hatchet. He felt that he was burying that hatchet now----if she would only let him. He declared, "You know I only went to that darned little eating-place to see you," and it was with the manner of one who hands over his revolver that he had said it. "I loathe fish." (But this was not a proposal!) Olwen, gazing not at him, but through the window at a cluster of yellow crocuses on the lawn, exclaimed softly, "As if you didn't know that this is the first hint you've ever given me of your wanting to see me at all!" Captain Ross took a step back on the hearthrug. He gave a short and angry laugh. "The fairrrrrst hint?" he cried, as if aghast. "Of course it is," declared Olwen. "It's nothing of the kind," doggedly from the man. "Plenty of other ... things of that sort." They were both wrong, and they knew it. It is unlikely that Olwen had forgotten that Elysian evening on the lagoon when Mr. Brown had pulled and she had sat in the stern-sheets with Captain Ross. To have your hand held in the moonlight tenderly, and for an hour on end, might fairly be called "a hint." So Captain Ross was right on that point. But he was wrong on every other. In the whole of their acquaintance that had been the one isolated instance in which he had failed to be as forbidding as an Army order. But at that moment (and indeed for several months afterwards) that incident in the boat was not to be referred to by either of them. For some obscure reason both of them felt more shy of that memory than any of fresh experiences. Quickly Olwen got on with this war in the enemy's country. "Hints? I'm sure I don't know what they could have been. That box of chocolates at Les Pins. But I've had other boxes of chocolates given to me----" "I've no doubt of that" (with grimness). "So you can hardly call that a 'hint,' Captain Ross!"