But for the engagement which it had already brought about, Olwen would have been forced to the conclusion that it was all a fraud, that Charm. Couldn't be that for some people it possessed power, for others none at all? Had it only no effect when it was worn by her, Olwen? The "no" to this question came almost as she was asking it; but not in the way that the girl had wished. Little Mr. Brown, having been busy as he chattered, unheeded by her! for the last ten minutes, had now moved into position the whole of his effects--except the canvas chair on which Olwen was sitting. His blue bulging eyes had glanced in her direction several times, as he pulled and shifted and set straight. Now he looked again, and at length. "I say, you know, you do look top-hole, sitting there like that," he told her, suddenly. "Wish I'd got my little kodak that I had to leave at Southampton after all; I'd take a snap of you, just as you are. Sitting there, as if it were your own little place, and all----" He paused, still looking at her with his head on one side. He had taken his coat down from the bough, and stood, one arm in a sleeve of it, while he considered Olwen as if from a new point of view. He said: "It's just what it wants--what any house or cottage or anything wants. The little missus.... You'll be having a house of your own, o' course, one day." Olwen shook her head. "Never," she said, with all the gloom of a temporary conviction. "Oh! Come! Don't say that," Mr. Brown besought her, cheerily. "Course you will. All girls say they'll never marry, and all girls _do_, after all. All the pretty----All the ones like you, I'm sure." "I shan't," persisted Olwen, a trifle cheered however. "_I'm_ not pretty." "Oh! Who's fishing for compliments?" laughed Mr. Brown. He jerked the other arm into his coat and began to fasten it. "If you don't mind me saying so, you're the prettiest girl in the place by miles. You are. I'm not the only person in the hotel who thinks so, either." "Aren't you?" said Olwen, with a lift of her head, and of her heart. "Who----?" "Why that old boy who keeps the hotel; old Leroux. He said you were '_très jolie_' the other day, when you were passing the steps. I said 'wee, wee, _très_.' You've got such ripping eyes." "I don't think they're anything," said Olwen, disconsolate again. "They are," insisted little Mr. Brown, his pink, ordinary face becoming dignified by his sincerity. "And it's not only--not only that you've got a lovely little face. There's--well, I don't know what there is about it." "A charm, perhaps," suggested Olwen, with would-be irony; but he took up quite gravely: "That's it! Just what I meant. A charm. One sort of feels glad there is the kind of think walking about. It's like the song 'When we was in the trenches Fighting beside the Frenchies, We'd 'a' given all we 'ad for a girl like 'er, Wouldn't we, Bill? Aye!'