“It is very kind of you to say that,” he said, and he turned to her suddenly.  “Because you mean it.”

“It is true,” said Violet simply; and the next moment she was aware that someone very young was standing before her in that Indian garden beneath the starlit sky and faltering out statements as to his unworthiness.  The statements were familiar to her ears, but there was this which was unfamiliar:  they stirred her to passion.

She stepped back, throwing out a hand as if to keep him from her.

“Don’t,” she whispered.  “Don’t!”

She spoke like one who is hurt.  Amongst the feelings which had waked in her, dim and for the most part hardly understood, two at all events were clear.  One a vague longing for something different from the banal path she daily trod, the other a poignant regret that she was as she was.

But Linforth caught the hand which she held out to thrust him off, and, clasping it, drew her towards him.

“I love you,” he said; and she answered him in desperation: 

“But you don’t know me.”

“I know that I want you.  I know that I am not fit for you.”

And Violet Oliver laughed harshly.

But Dick Linforth paid no attention to that laugh.  His hesitation had gone.  He found that for this occasion only he had the gift of tongues.  There was nothing new and original in what he said.  But, on the other hand, he said it over and over again, and the look upon his face and the tone of his voice were the things which mattered.  At the opera it is the singer you listen to, and not the words of the song.  So in this rose garden Violet Oliver listened to Dick Linforth rather than to what he said.  There was audible in his voice from sentence to sentence, ringing through them, inspiring them, the reverence a young man’s heart holds for the woman whom he loves.

“You ought to marry, not me, but someone better,” she cried.  “There is someone I know—­in—­England—­who—­”

But Linforth would not listen.  He laughed to scorn the notion that there could be anyone better than Violet Oliver; and with each word he spoke he seemed to grow younger.  It was as though a miracle had happened.  He remained in her eyes what he really was, a man head and shoulders above her friends, and in fibre altogether different.  Yet to her, and for her, he was young, and younger than the youngest.  In spite of herself, the longing at her heart cried with a louder voice.  She sought to stifle it.

“There is the Road,” she cried.  “That is first with you.  That is what you really care for.”

“No,” he replied quietly.  She had hoped to take him at a disadvantage.  But he replied at once: 

“No.  I have thought that out.  I do not separate you from the Road.  I put neither first.  It is true that there was a time when the Road was everything to me.  But that was before I met you—­do you remember?—­in the inn at La Grave.”