"Oh, you know them probably, better than I," he said; "being a woman and used to them." "To what?" "To the ordinary masculine fatuities of admiration, for instance." "No," she said reflectively; "you don't succeed in expressing those. Do you try?" "Not much, I'm afraid. They offend me." "_You!_" she exclaimed, surprised into facing him with lifted brows, "you might have said they would offend a woman." "I might have, years and years ago!" he replied; "but that passed with other elevating superstitions of one's youth. Since then I've observed an unpleasant variety in admirations, but have yet to meet the offended woman. No, a woman may call you a fool for your flummery, or even think you one; but she'll give you every opening to repeat the folly." The surprise in Lettice Nevern's eyes grew more serious. "You think a man should never tell a woman that he admires her?" she said. "He needn't appraise her to her face like a fat ox in a show-pen! unless--oh, well, unless, I suppose, she likes it." "And then?" He shrugged his shoulders. "Oh, then, one might say, she's qualified for the show-pen. Let him tie on the ticket." A stain of duller red upon the girl's cheek would have betrayed some quickening of her thought, had he been looking at her, instead of out across the purple level of the sea, where, above Ballindra, the harbour hills were turning in the slanting sunlight from topaz to amethyst. The smile of humorous toleration with which Maurice Caragh accepted half the perplexities of life had always seemed to her so completely to reveal his mind--like the pool before them, through which the light filtered to the very floor--that this dark humour of depreciation let out the sounding line through her fingers into unanchorable depths. "I think you're a little hard," she said slowly; "women aren't vain, as a rule; at least not like that. It's their humility that makes them care so much to be admired." "I see," he smiled. "But I don't object to the admiration; that's inevitable; only to the way it's paid." "But how is a woman to know if you don't tell her?" "Do you ask?" he said. "I?" she questioned. "Why?" "I thought the last fortnight would have taught you that," he said quietly. Her eyes flashed upon him ere she could prevent them, and from the flash her cheeks took colour as though they faced a flame. But she was playing with the shells in her hand again before he noticed that she had moved her head, but the tip of her forefinger trembled as she pushed the tiny pink heap across her palm. "Taught me what?" she murmured. "What I couldn't say," he replied, adding determinedly, as she would not help him, "how much I admired you." She turned her face half way towards him with a little pathetic distrustful smile. "Couldn't you see it?" he said. Her under lip quivered as her mouth moved to answer him; then, as though afraid to trust the simplest word to it, she shook her head.