That settled it, he felt. Well, she had every right to her challenge; he had put it into her mouth. It was characteristic, curiously enough, of his fortuitous nature, that, despite the unedifying fashion in which his intention had hitherto hung and veered--nosing, as it were, the wind of opportunity for a flaw that suited it--he put his helm over now with irrevocable decision. "You've cause to ask that," he said with a smile, "since I left out the only reason that seems to make admiration speakable." "Yes?" she asked simply. "What is it?" He raised himself from his elbow, on to his wrist, with one knee beneath him, straightening himself with respectful homage to the occasion. "Adoration!" he replied. "No man's eulogies can be an insult to the woman he adores." Her eyes, brave enough before, would not meet that, and he saw the vain attempt to steady the rebellious tenderness of her lips. Their tremor touched him as it had before; his voice lost its little air of drama and dropped into the boyish plainness which so well became it. "Please," he explained, "I should have said that first: only I didn't, because I thought you knew it. I'm not silly enough to suppose it matters whether I adore you or not, except just as an apology, the only apology for what I oughtn't to have said." She was looking down deliberately at the hand on which she leant, and even her lips were hid from him. He bent towards her and put his hand over hers upon the sand. "Dear," he said humbly, "it seems so idle to say I love you, that I only dare to say it--as an excuse. Will you let it stand at that, and forgive me just because of it? You needn't tell me that I have no claim, and never had the least encouragement to speak of such a thing. I know that. It's inconsiderate and presumptuous, and there's only me to blame. But some day, perhaps, you won't mind remembering that I worshipped you, and try to be a little sorry for me after all." But what she tried, not over successfully, was to say his name. Yet her lips proclaimed it with such a tremulous appropriation as to answer all his other questions. II Maurice had never known an hour so disordered as that which followed his declaration. His mind was like a locomotive factory trying at a moment's notice to make balloons. It was a scene of astounding and fantastic compromises. The attitude for the occasion appeared to be a clear high joyousness tinged with the overwhelming sense of an unlooked-for favour. Something approaching that in appearance he did certainly achieve; enough to make for the girl the moment of its immense significance; to give it the acclamation, the splendour of crowning circumstance. His gladness, like the colour of a flag that suddenly dyes the air with victory, brought the strangest, the most assuring tumult to her heart. She heard it, as the beleaguered hear the guns that end their siege, too faint, too happy, too amazed to answer.