She rose then from the rock where she had been sitting and stood there lance-like, with her chin high and her glance averted. To his question she offered no response save a short laugh, until the pulses in his temples began to throb, and once more he closed his eyes as one instinctively closes them under a wave of physical pain. Boone had made valiant and chivalrous resolves of silence, but he had heard a laugh touched with bitterness from lips upon which bitterness was by nature alien. "Anne!" he exclaimed in a frightened tone, "what made you laugh like that?" Then she wheeled, and her words came torrentially. There was anger and perplexity and a little scorn in her voice but also a dominant disappointment. "I mean, Boone Wellver, that I don't know how to take you. Sometimes I think you really like me--lots. Not just lumped in with everybody that you can manage to call a friend. I have no use for lukewarm friendships--I'd rather have none at all. You seem to be in deadly fear of spoiling me with your lordly favour." The boy stood before her with a face that had grown ashen. It seemed incredible to him that she could so misconstrue his attitude; an attitude based on hard and studied self-control. "You think that, do you?" he inquired in a low voice, almost fierce in its intensity. "Do you think I'm fool enough not to take thankfully what I can get, without crying for the moon?" "What has the moon to do with it?" she demanded. But the vow of silence which Boone had taken with the grave solemnity of a Trappist monk was no longer a dependable bulwark. The dam had broken. "Just this," he said soberly. "You're as far out of my reach as the moon itself. You say I seem afraid to tell you that I really like you. I _am_ afraid. I'm so mortally afraid that I'd sworn I'd never tell you.... God knows that I couldn't start talking about that without saying the whole of it. I can't say I like you because I don't like you--I love you--I love you like--" The rapid flood of words broke off in abrupt silence. Then the boy raised his hands and let them fall again in a gesture of despair. "There isn't anything in the world to liken it to," he declared. Anne's eyes had widened in astonishment. She said nothing at all, and Boone waited, steeling himself against the expected sentence of exile. Nothing less than banishment, he had always told himself, could be the penalty of such an outburst.