“Not go over to-morrow, you mean?” Jerry questioned, looking up at his host, docile to any suggestion. “I’d so much rather have it settled straight off. And I have a feeling that if I could get at Alix over there, with her mother to help me, I should get it settled.” “I’m sure you wouldn’t. And nothing would unsettle your own mother so much. You’ll gain everything with Alix, and with your mother, if you show them that you can wait. Write to Alix, of course; write constantly. Tell her all about it; your feelings, you know, and what you think about her eyes.—You both care for the same things: riding; out of doors; fancy-dress balls, and the ‘Hymn of Pan.’ What you’ve got to uphold, you see, Jerry, what you’ve got to justify, is our English conception of being in love. You must overbear convention; you must break down parental scruples. You must show yourself so much in love to Alix that you’ll convince her that romance is common-sense. You see, I want you to win her, not only for yourself, but for England.” Jerry’s eyes were on him while he spoke and they dwelt for some moments of bright contemplation as if for the first time he was looking at Giles more carefully than he had looked at the gas-fire and the mantelpiece. “You know, if I may say so, I do think you’re a very remarkable person,” he observed. “Am I? Why?” Giles asked, smiling rather sadly. “Well”—Jerry continued to look at him, but he blushed again—“to care so much about a girl you’re not in love with yourself. Doing everything for her. I’ve heard a lot about you, you may be sure. Alix thinks more of you than of anybody in the world.” Giles, too, was blushing now. “Does she?” he said. They were suddenly two boys together, and as they spoke of love and of Alix their words, to Giles, seemed to lift her far away out of childhood and to set her, a woman, between them. “I’m most awfully fond of Alix,” he said. “I know. That’s what’s so remarkable,” said Jerry, shyly smiling. “To be so fond, yet not to be in love.” “You see,” Giles found himself offering, really as if in a sort of exculpation, “one may be in love with someone else; that would prevent, wouldn’t it? And you can care immensely about someone without being in love with them.” “Could one? When she’s Alix? I can’t imagine it,” Jerry a little nervously smiled. “Unless, as you suggest, there’s someone else, and then I shouldn’t have time to care so much for another girl.” Jerry’s ingenuous analysis certainly had its potency; Giles did not quite know what to say to him. “Even if I had been, it wouldn’t have done me any good,” he suggested. “Alix would never have thought of me.” “Well, you mustn’t ask _me_ to say that she would!” Jerry laughed out at this. He got up as he spoke and went to the mantelpiece, picking up and examining one of the horrid little china animals thereon. But he was not seeing it. “England will get her in a much more satisfactory way, for Alix, than it would if I were in the running,” said Giles.