She had spoken the first time, looking
straight "before her into the fire. This
time she turned to look round, and up, at
some one standing half behind her, the
earnestness of startled appeal that was in
her face as she did so causing this some
one a grim kind of amusement.

How pretty she looked, he was thinking,
the fire-light glancing on the soft round
throat that rose from the black bodice, and
shining on the small white hands clasped
on her knee. The chair she sat in being
very low, and he being rather tall, her head
had to be thrown far back before her eyes
could meet his. They did this only for a
flash, and were then again averted.

"' Much rather not!' What sort of an
answer is that to give a man to such a
question? And, pray, why would you ' so
much rather not?'

"Because, well, because I would so
much rather not! Because I'm so tired,
and because anything new, any great
change, would be .... would be. Oh,
Kenneth, you know I never could express
myself properly."

"Would be—what?"
: ' So troublesome."
"' So troublesome!'"
"It is rude and unkind of you to laugh
at me."

" But, Daisy, you want laughing at, you
want well laughing at. You ought to be
laughed out of such childish, or old-maidish
ideas."

"And if I am old-maidish," she said,
her face flushed vividly with annoyance at
the term, he thought, " I'd rather remain
so: I'd so much rather remain just as I
am. Kenneth, dear Kenneth, if you please,
don't trouble me. Don't be angry with me,
just let me remain as I am."

The poor little coward dreaded agitatation,
with a physical and a mental dread:
she dreaded love, she dreaded joy, dreaded
everything likely to stir her heart and her
life out of its brief quiet.

"'Don't trouble you,' " he very uncourteously
again echoed her words. " And
wouldn't you take a little ' trouble ' to make
me happy, Daisy? If not, I've been much
mistaken in Daisy. Do you think trouble
the worst thing in the world, and comfort
the best? If so, you are not my Daisy,
but some lazy, spoilt little woman. What
is the meaning of it all, Daisy?"

She struggled with herself a moment,
struggled for the power to speak lightly.
Then she said:

"I will answer you in the words of my favourite,
Sir Dinadan, King Arthur's only
lady-less knight, you know, who says ' The
joy of love is too short, and the sorrow
there-of, and what cometh there-of dureth
over-long.'"

"You have been studying in a bad
school."

"I will quote from another master, then"
It is Chaucer who says:

For love is yet the moste stormy lyf,
Right of himself, that ever was begunne,
For ever some mystrust, or nice stryf,
Ther is in love, some cloudis in that sunne."

Her friend considered her carefully while
she spoke, and, after she had spoken, kept
silent. He was conscious of a curious thrill
of some sort of passion through her attempt
at light playfulness, and he called to mind
(it was not strikingly visible now by the
fire-light) how, once or twice, he had been
pained by the look of careworn age that
would creep over the childish, soft face.

This silence of his troubled Daisy; she
was more afraid of it than of any such
speech as had, as yet, been between them.

"If you knew," she said, "how happy
these last months have been to me, and how
I needed the rest their peace has given me,
you, who are so good, so unselfish, would
not ask me to think of any change.

"Is all the unselfishness to be on my
side, Daisy?"

"But you, too, have seemed very happy."

"No, not that. I have been pleasing
myself with the hope that I was about to
be very happy."

At this moment a servant brought in the
lamp. She shut out the twilight, and
muffled a thrush's song by closing shutters
and drawing curtains.

Daisy immediately rose from her low
chair by the fire, and seating herself at the
table, took up her work, to which she
devoted herself with a spasmodic sort of
energy.

In her fear of silence she began to talk
as she worked, of anything, so that it was
nothing, and safe to lead to nothing. Of the
lateness and the coldness of this year's
early spring; but of how, now, at last, that
cold seemed over, and everything was
budding and blooming miraculously.

To all she said, Mr. Stewart answered
not a word, and, by-and-bye, Daisy came
to a discomforted pause. Then he spoke,
meditatively:

"It is strange to think, Daisy, that
there are two or three years of your life of
which I know absolutely nothing. I, who,
up to the time of my going to India to
fetch home poor Lily and her children, saw