'But people do not think so,' said Hazel. 'People make it out to be just something supplemental,—a sort of convenient finishing up the few trifles of comfort or help wherein a man may be deficient. That is what they all say.—It is a very queer thing to be a woman!' 'Is it?' said Dane gravely. 'Yes!' said Hazel with one of her outbursts.—'Prim tells me not to vex you, and Dr. Maryland wants to know if—if I shall be a help or a hindrance, in short; and he hopes you will not let me have my own way too much. Nobody enquires if you are likely to vex me, or to try my temper, or to develope my character, or help on my work; nobody supposes that I _have_ any work, of my own. But if I have not, that is only the more queer.' Rollo left his seat, he had got enough of his nuts; and coming behind Wych Hazel gently laid hold of both her hands and freed them from what they held, then insinuated her chair backwards, and lifting her out of it led her away to the fire and wrapped her in his arms. What it was no use to say, he did not say, however; as he had once told her he never asked for a thing he could not have, so even now, he would not supplicate for confidence which must be the growth of time. She would find out for herself, by and by, what concerned him; and the rest he did not are about. So his answer now was a departure. He did not kiss her; he stood pushing back the brown curls from her brow, on one side and on the other, looking down into her face with eyes which Hazel instinctively knew were too mighty to meet just then. So standing he coolly asked her, 'Do you love me, duchess?' 'I was talking of loving myself,' said Hazel, touching up her flushed cheeks with vivid carnation. 'I can do that better than you can. How about your part?' 'Reasoning from facts—probably—I must!' 'You are afraid to confide that deep secret to me? Now I should have no sort of difficulty in proclaiming mine to anybody who had any business to ask it. It must be a queer thing to be a woman!'— said Dane, with a dry, humourous, but at the same time wholly tender and sweet expression. 'Have I not confided it?' Hazel said under her breath. 'Do you think I would be here? What makes you ask such things? Is it because—' But there she stopped. 'Because is a woman's reason. I never do things "because." What did you mean to ask?' 'I think I have been very unlike myself,—that is all.' 'I never saw you unlike yourself,' Dane said, in that gentle manner and tone of his which was more than epithets and endearments from other people. Much more; for those might be mere forms of expression, and these could not be. And she enquired no further, nor raised her eyes to search. Standing there with a host of other questions in her mind; questions she would like to have discussed and settled, but which never would be;—so she thought. Unless indeed in the slow, unsatisfactory way in which time settles all things. CHAPTER XXV. PRIM'S TRUNK.