"But why," I asked, "should you wish me to give up my detective work, or trouble yourself about me at all?" "You are very unkind," she said, suddenly breaking down and, to my indescribable astonishment and dismay, bursting into tears. Recalling, at this lapse of time, the course of our conversation on that occasion, I do not consider that I was guilty of any unpardonable offence against good taste or good manners; but at the moment, and at sight of her tears, my behaviour struck me as blackguardly beyond belief. "Oh, please, Miss Carleton, don't cry!" I gasped imploringly. "I was a beast, a blackguard, a bully. Forgive me--won't you forgive me? I wouldn't do or say or even think a thing that would hurt you for worlds--for--for--I--I--love you. I loved you from the moment I saw you in the boat. I shall love you as long as ever I live." When, for the first time, a man tells a woman, and with evident sincerity, that he loves her, he not unnaturally expects that she would receive his declaration with some consciousness of the fact that what he says is, to him at least, a matter of supreme importance. Kate, on the contrary, took my avowal with what I considered ill-timed levity. Possibly that avowal told her nothing of which she was not already aware; possibly she did not approve of the suddenness with which I had sprung it upon her, or of the unconventionality of my wooing; possibly she merely wished to gain time before giving me an answer. Be that as it may, she not only proved herself to be a very self-possessed young person, but a calculating little body into the bargain. Having brought me metaphorically to my knees, having reduced me to a condition in which I was not likely to deny her anything, she suddenly released one eye from the eclipsing handkerchief which, a moment before, had hidden both. Regarding me out of the corner of this eye, but with the other still behind the handkerchief--like a horseman who, with one foot in the stirrup, waits the final word which shall decide whether he is to ride away or to stay--she smiled at me through her tears, and with the air of one making a bargain said: "Then you promise?" "Promise what?" I asked. "To give up this detective work." "Why, no! I can't promise that," I replied. "I hate you! I hate you!" she cried, and, springing to her feet, flung angrily out of the room. CHAPTER XXII. THE INEXPLICABLE CONDUCT OF MISS CLARA.