ove me!" she said.

He made a movement of astonishment.

"Try," he muttered. "But it seems to me--" He broke off, saying to
himself that if he loved her, he had never told her so in so many words.
Simple words! They died on his lips. "What makes you say that?" he
asked.

She lowered her eyelids and turned her head a little.

"I have done nothing," she said in a low voice. "It's you who have been
good, helpful, and tender to me. Perhaps you love me for that--just
for that; or perhaps you love me for company, and because--well! But
sometimes it seems to me that you can never love me for myself, only
for myself, as people do love each other when it is to be for ever."
Her head drooped. "Forever," she breathed out again; then, still more
faintly, she added an entreating: "Do try!"

These last words went straight to his heart--the sound of them more than
the sense. He did not know what to say, either from want of practice in
dealing with women or simply from his innate honesty of thought. All
his defences were broken now. Life had him fairly by the throat. But he
managed a smile, though she was not looking at him; yes, he did manage
it--the well-known Heyst smile of playful courtesy, so familiar to all
sorts and conditions of men in the islands.

"My dear Lena," he said, "it looks as if you were trying to pick a very
unnecessary quarrel with me--of all people!"

She made no movement. With his elbows spread out he was twisting the
ends of his long moustaches, very masculine and perplexed, enveloped in
the atmosphere of femininity as in a cloud, suspecting pitfalls, and as
if afraid to move.

"I must admit, though," he added, "that there is no one else; and I
suppose a certain amount of quarrelling is necessary for existence in
this world."

That girl, seated in her chair in graceful quietude, was to him like a
script in an unknown language, or even more simply mysterious, like
any writing to the illiterate. As far as women went he was altogether
uninstructed and he had not the gift of intuition which is fostered in
the days of youth by dreams and visions, exercises of the heart fitting
it for the encounters of a world, in which love itself rests as much
on antagonism as on attraction. His mental attitude was that of a man
looking this way and that on a piece of writing which he is unable to
decipher, but which may be big with some revelation. He didn't know what
to say. All he found to add was:

"I don't even und