"Perhaps. You _are_ attractive to women! I've heard that often enough to be convinced. Why, even I can see what attracts them"--she turned to look at him--"the way your head and shoulders set--and--well, the--rest. . . . It's rather superior of me to have escaped sentiment, don't you think so?" "Indeed I do. Few--few escape where many meet to worship at my frisky feet, and this I say without conceit is due to my mustachios. Tangled in those like web-tied flies, imprisoned hearts complain in sighs--in fact, the situation vies with moments in Boccaccio." Her running comment was her laughter, ringing deliciously amid the trees until a wild bird, restlessly attentive, ventured a long, sweet response from the tangled green above them. After their laughter the soberness of reaction left them silent for a while. The wild bird sang and sang, dropping fearlessly nearer from branch to branch, until in his melody she found the key to her dreamy thoughts. "Because," she said, "you are so unconscious of your own value, I like you best, I think. I never before quite realised just what it was in you." "My value," he said, "is what you care to make it." "Then nobody can afford to take you away from me, Captain Selwyn." He flushed with pleasure: "That is the prettiest thing a woman ever admitted to a man," he said. "You have said nicer things to me. That is your reward. I wonder if you remember any of the nice things you say to me? Oh, don't look so hurt and astonished--because I don't believe you do. . . . Isn't it jolly to sit here and let life drift past us? Out there in the world"--she nodded backward toward the open--"out yonder all that 'progress' is whirling around the world, and here we sit--just you and I--quite happily, swinging our feet in perfect content and talking nonsense. . . . What more is there after all than a companionship that admits both sense and nonsense?" She laughed, turning her chin on her shoulder to glance at him; and when the laugh had died out she still sat lightly poised, chin nestling in the hollow of her shoulder, considering him out of friendly beautiful eyes in which no mockery remained. "What more is there than our confidence in each other and our content?" she said. And, as he did not respond: "I wonder if you realise how perfectly lovely you have been to me since you have come into my life? Do you? Do you remember the first day--the very first--how I sent word to you that I wished you to see my first real dinner gown? Smile if you wish--Ah, but you don't, you _don't_ understand, my poor friend, how much you became to me in that little interview. . . . Men's kindness is a strange thing; they may try and try, and a girl may know they are trying and, in her turn, try to be grateful. But it is all effort on both sides. Then--with a word--an impulse born of chance or instinct--a man may say and do that which a woman can never forget--and would not if she could." "Have I done--that?"