So they came across fields and down through fragrant lanes to Witch-Hollow, where the fat setter gambolled ponderously around them with fat barkings and waggings, and where Molly, sewing on the porch, smoothed the frail and tiny garment over her knee and raised her pretty head to survey them with a smiling intelligence that made Strelsa blush. "It _isn't_ so!" she found an opportunity to whisper into Molly's ear. "If you look at us that way you'll simply make him miserable and break my heart." Molly glanced after Quarren who had wandered indoors to find a cigarette in the smoking-room. "If you don't marry that delectable young man," she said, "I'll take a stick and beat you, Strelsa." "I don't want to--I don't _want_ to!" protested the girl, getting possession of Molly's hands and covering them with caresses. And, resting her soft lips on Molly's fingers, she looked at her; and the young matron saw tears glimmering under the soft, dark lashes. "I _can't_ love him--that way," whispered the girl. "I would if I could.... I couldn't care for him more than I do.... And--and it terrifies me to think of losing him." "Losing him?" "Yes--by doing what you--what he--wishes." "You think you'll lose him if you marry him?" "I--yes. It would spoil him for me--spoil everything for me in the world----" "Well, you listen to me," said Molly, exasperated. "When he has stood a certain amount of this silliness from you he'll really and actually turn into the sexless comrade you think you want. But he'll go elsewhere for a mate. There are plenty suitable in the world. If you'd never been born there would have been another for him. If you passed out of his life there would some day be another. "Will we women never learn the truth?--that at best we are incidental to man, but that, when we love, man is the whole bally thing to us? "Let him escape and you'll see, Strelsa. You'll get, perhaps, what you're asking for now, but he'll get what he is asking for, too--if not from you, from some girl of whom you and I and he perhaps have never heard. "But she exists; don't worry. And any man worth his title is certain to encounter her sooner or later." The girl, flushed, dumb, watched her out of wide gray eyes in which the unshed tears had dried. The pretty matron slowly shook her head: "Because you once bit into tainted fruit you laid the axe to the entire orchard. What nonsense! Rottenness is the exception; soundness the rule. But you concluded that the hazard of bad fortune--that the unhappy chance of your first and only experience--was not an exception but the universal rule.... Very well; think it! He'll get over it some time, but you never will, Strelsa. You'll remember it all your life.