"No. But you are going away--and my reason for speaking--" He checked himself; his reasons were impossible; there was no extenuation to be found in them, no adequate explanation for them, or for his attitude toward this young girl which had crystallised over night--over a sleepless, thrilling night--dazzling him with its wonder and its truth and its purity in the clean rays of the morning sun. She watched his expression as it changed, troubled, uncertain how to regard him, now. "It isn't very much like you, to ask me such a question," she said. "Before I met you, you thought me one kind of a man; after I met you, you thought me another. Have I turned out to be a third kind?" "N-no." "Would I turn into the first kind if I ask you again to answer my question?" She gave him a swift, expressionless glance: "I want to like you; I'm trying to, Mr. Quarren. Won't you let me?" "I want to have the right to like _you_, too--perhaps more than you will care to have me----" "Please don't speak that way--I don't know what you mean, anyway----" "That is why I asked you the question--to find out whether I had a right to----" "Right!" she repeated. "What right? What do you mean? What have you misinterpreted in me that has given you any rights as far as I am concerned? Did you misunderstand our few hours of masked acquaintance--a few moments of perfectly innocent imprudence?--my overlooking certain conventions and listening to you at the telephone this morning--my receiving you here at this silly hour? What has given you any right to say anything to me, Mr. Quarren--to hint of the possibility of anything serious--for the future--or at any time whatever?" "I have no right," he said, wincing. "Indeed you have not!" she rejoined warmly, flushed and affronted. "I am glad that is perfectly clear to you." "No right at all," he repeated--"except the personal privilege of recognising what is cleanest and sweetest and most admirable and most unspoiled in life; the right to care for it without knowing exactly why--the desire to be part of it--as have all men who are awakened out of trivial dreams when such a woman as you crosses their limited and foolish horizon." She sat staring at him, struggling to comprehend what he was saying, perfectly unable to believe, nor even wishing to, yet painfully attentive to his every word. "Mr. Quarren," she said, "I was hurt. I imagined presumption where there was none. But I am afraid you are romantic and impulsive to an amazing degree. Yet, both romance and impulse have a place and a reason, not undignified, in human intercourse."--She felt rather superior in turning this phrase, and looked on him a little more kindly---- "If the compliment which you have left me to infer is purely a romantic one, it is nevertheless unwarranted--and, forgive me, unacceptable. The trouble is----" She paused to recover her wits and her breath; but he took the latter away again as he said: