He caught her to him. With his one arm slung about her, he put a scorching kiss upon her throat, under her ear. Then he took her chin in his hand and turned her face round; he kissed the childishly red mouth until little Olwen, all shy and aflame, felt that the shape of his own would be moulded upon her lips. For all his theorizings, his protestations, his boastings about Love, he was yet a lover ... or perhaps it would be truer to say a lover at last. As for her.... The whole of her girl's nature seemed to stretch out gleeful hands to the gift that he made to her--of herself. Till now she had resembled--what? The sea-anemone that for weary hours of low-tide has waited self-contained and folded into itself upon its rock, an inert lump.... At last the warm waves rise, and lo! the rosy fingers spread to welcome its own element have turned it to a lovely thing, a star-shaped flower of flesh. Into her sigh of delight he heard her murmur, "No! I _mustn't_----" "Mustn't what?" muttered the strange voice of him who was no longer the Captain Ross of this story, but the Fergus of their love-tale that was beginning. And in Love, after all, all's well that begins well. (Even though there was no real "proposal" after all.) He coaxed, "Mustn't what, Honey?" "Mustn't like you any _more_, or you won't like me as _much_!" It was Woman's dearly-bought wisdom----but he laughed at it until his teeth gleamed across his vivid face. She? Do anything he would not like? Even if she loved him and showed it, even that could not cool this man off, now he knew. The chit had got him going sure enough. Whatever she did or said only added to her attraction, to her long-contested, her triumphant, her Disturbing Charm! POSTSCRIPT THE CHARM CONFESSED With regard to the three words with which the last chapter closed: The Disturbing Charm.... What was its story, after all, apart from the tangled stories of those people into whose lives it twined its thread of rose colour? Perhaps it was all summed up in a letter that came, one February morning of Nineteen-Eighteen, to Professor Howel-Jones. The old botanist was sitting in his study. It was a wide, cleared room with a table as chaotic as that had been at Les Pins, set, as at Les Pins, before a window; but the view here was not of a lagoon with a belt of dunes and a lighthouse. It showed the roofs of Liverpool. Professor Howel-Jones had just returned, after various wanderings, to find a big mail awaiting him. He sighed, as he opened the letters, for his little niece and secretary. (Olwen had not been replaced.) Then he knit his brows over the letter in his hand. It said: "DEAR SIR, "The writer of this letter has reproached himself more than once over the rather stupid practical joke that he elected to play upon a man of your attainments by sending to you what was alleged to be the discovery of a love-germ, or Disturbing Charm----"