He spoke as though the meeting had taken place years before instead of two months ago. "Tell me," he added, with eager persuasiveness, "do you like me?... just a little?" Now Peggy was a young woman who had listened to such confidences often, and who, by reason of the numbers of her admirers, had grown hardened to their appeals. She found them, however, sufficiently embarrassing to cause her to regret, not so much wounding her lovers, as the trouble she was put to in order to wound them as little as possible. It showed a want of consideration on the part of the men she wished to be friendly with when they made that agreeable condition no longer possible. Youth and beauty in a woman handicap her in the matter of masculine friendship; yet eliminate the disqualifying attributes, and the difficulty of friendship with the opposite sex is even greater. The position therefore becomes well-nigh impossible. Peggy looked back at the young man with such disconcerting candour in the grey eyes that he began to feel somewhat foolish and found himself reddening awkwardly. A girl when she receives a proposal of marriage has no right to appear so composed. "I like you so well," Peggy answered him quietly, "that I hope you won't say anything more. It's--such a pity," she faltered, losing something of her former calmness, "to spoil everything. Let us take a mutual liking for granted, and leave it at that." This sounded like a brilliant inspiration, but was in reality a repetition of a suggestion made on a similar occasion to an entirely different suppliant. The experience of its ill-success on the former occasion might have prepared her for its inefficacy now, but it was the only thing which flashed into her mind at the moment, and she said it a little breathlessly in the hope that it would decide Doctor Fairbridge in favour of retreat. It failed, however, of the desired effect. He caught at the leaf of a palm near his arm and began unthinkingly on its destruction, not looking at the mischievous work of his fingers, but staring at Peggy. "I can't leave it at that," he said. "It--it isn't liking with me. I love you. I... Please be patient with me, Miss Annersley. I find it so difficult to express all I feel. Of course, I can't expect that you should love me as I love you... How should you? But I am hoping that perhaps--in time--" He broke off, so manifestly at a loss in face of the discouragement he read in her indifferent look, so awkward and disturbed and reproachful at her lack of reciprocity, that he found it impossible to proceed with his appeal. He had, in rehearsing the interview in bed on the previous night, brought it to such an entirely different issue that the situation as it actually befell found him unprepared. The virile eloquence of the previous night did not fit the present occasion. "I want to marry," he finished lamely.