"Please don't." She pressed her lips together. "I ought not to have let you say as much." She tried to meet his eyes frankly, but that young ardour in them disconcerted her. She looked aside, leant a hand on the hard red bark of the pine nearest to her. "Of course," she concluded (very feebly, as she felt!), "I am so glad you like me, Mr. Awdas.... I hope we shall always be ... great friends...." "Friends?" echoed the boy. He put back his small head and laughed. "Like you? But I want you to marry me." She looked at him, at a loss for just the right words. He persisted, still smiling. "But, of course, you've got to marry me." Now she gave a little hopeless laugh, glancing about as if to take on to her side the tall old trees, the distant sea, the sunset-clouds. She said, with an attempt to put the conversation on a more natural basis, "You know, you mustn't talk nonsense to me----" "Why nonsense?" quickly. "This is dead earnest." She said quietly: "Mr. Awdas, how old are you? Twenty-two, aren't you?" "Yes; but look here! That's got absolutely nothing to do with this----" "Everything," said the woman. "You're twenty-two; I am----" "I don't want to know," he broke in. "You're--you. You've got nothing to do with ages, or age. You're so wonderful. There's nobody in the world like you. I love you," he ended, in a mutter. "I want you to marry me." There was a lump in Mrs. Cartwright's throat as she said ruefully, "I might be your mother." He cried out impatiently: "Oh, dash it all! So '_might_' Madame Leroux, or anybody else, be my mother! The point is, they don't happen to be. You don't either. You aren't. And you're going to be my wife. Don't you see how I care for you?" She was struck by the stark simplicity of him. He cared so much, then, that he should not think of its not meaning everything to the person beloved, as well as himself. He was looking down at her not only adoringly, but masterfully. To him this new love was so wonderful that it must needs be omnipotent. Sorry, and touched more deeply that she had dreamed, she sighed as she stood there in the wood and set herself to argue. She went over them all, the old, the obvious, the stock facts that have proved themselves for centuries, the truths whose lasting light is put out only by the transient fairy glamour of Infatuation. "_You see, this is a passing thing. This happens to almost every young man once in his life. He looks back and laughs at it._" "_ ... fatal to marry out of one's generation!_" "_In a little time you'll know how right I am----_" "_ ... ten years hence you'd look at me, and see I was an old woman. You'd still be a young man. It would be horrible!_" The boy looked at her and smiled as she spoke, and she knew that the words meant nothing to him, the lips that uttered them were everything.