The words, uttered with an undercurrent of deep passion, struck a familiar chord in Ann's mind. They were like, and yet unlike, something she had heard before. For a moment she puzzled over it, the connection eluding her. Then, all at once, it flashed over her, and she remembered how Brett Forrester had said: _"The past doesn't matter to me. It's the future that counts."_ These two men, Eliot and Brett, loved very differently, she thought! With Brett, love meant a passionate determination to possess the woman he desired whether she surrendered willingly or with every fibre of her spirit in revolt. But to Eliot, love signified something deeper and more enduring. He wanted all of the woman he would make his wife--soul as well as body, past as well as future, the supreme gift which only a woman who loves perfectly can give and which only a man whose love is on the same high plane should dare to ask. "I should never be content with less," Eliot went on. "I think if you were ever to fail me, Ann--" He broke off abruptly, as though the bare idea were torture. "But I shan't fail you!" she replied confidently. "I love you"--simply. "And when one loves, one doesn't fail." His arms tightened their clasp about her till she could feel the hard beating of his heart against her own. "Heart's dearest!" he murmured, his lips against her throat. Presently she lifted her head from his shoulder and regarded him with questioning eyes. "You didn't tell me what would happen to me if I _did_ fail you?" "Don't speak of it!" he said sharply. "But it's just as well to know the worst," she persisted laughingly. She felt so sure--so safe--with his arms round her that she could afford to joke a little about something that could never happen. "Would you cut off my head--as Bluebeard cut off the heads of his wives?" For a moment he made no answer. Then: "I should simply wipe you out of my life. That's all." He spoke very evenly, but with such a note of absolute finality in his quiet voice that Ann quivered a little as she lay in his arms--as one might wince if any one laid the keen edge of a naked blade against one's throat, no matter how lightly. "Ah! Don't let's talk of such things!" she cried hastily. "Don't let's spoil our first day, Eliot. Do you realise"--with a radiant smile--"that this is the first--the very first--day we have really belonged to each other?" So they talked of other things--the foolish, sweet, and tender things which lovers have always talked and probably always will--things which are of no moment to the busy material-minded world as it bustles on its way, but which are the frail filaments out of which men and women fashion for themselves dear memories that shall sweeten all their lives. But time will not wait, even for lovers, and Eliot had been gone over an hour when at last Robin returned from Ferribridge. "Cast a shoe and had to wait an unconscionable time to get my horse shod," he explained briefly.