“Now I suppose you’re going to be very noble and very nasty about it,” observed Miss Hugonin, resentfully.  “That’s my main objection to you, you know, that you haven’t any faults I can recognise and feel familiar and friendly with.”

“My dear,” he protested, “I assure you I am not intentionally disagreeable.”

At that, she raised velvet eyes to his—­with a visible effort, though—­and smiled.

“I know you far too well to think that,” she said, wistfully.  “I know I’m not worthy of you.  I’m tremendously fond of you, beautiful, but—­but, you see, I love somebody else,” Margaret concluded, with admirable candour.

“Ah!” said he, in a rather curious voice.  “The painter chap, eh?”

Then Margaret’s face flamed in a wonderful glow of shame and happiness and pride that must have made the surrounding roses very hopelessly jealous.  A quaint mothering look, sacred, divine, Madonna-like, woke in her great eyes as she thought—­remorsefully—­of how unhappy Billy must be at that very moment and of how big he was and of his general niceness; and she desired, very heartily, that this fleshy young man would make his scene and have done with it.  Who was he, forsooth, to keep her from Billy?  She wished she had never heard of Felix Kennaston.

Souvent femme varie, my brothers.

However, “Yes,” said Margaret..

“You are a dear,” said Mr. Kennaston, with conviction in his voice.

I dare say Margaret was surprised.

But the poet had taken her hand and had kissed it reverently, and then sat down beside her, twisting one foot under him in a fashion he had.  He was frankly grateful to her for refusing him; and, the mask of affectation slipped, she saw in him another man.

“I am an out-and-out fraud,” he confessed, with the gayest of smiles.  “I am not in love with you, and I am inexpressibly glad that you are not in love with me.  Oh, Margaret, Margaret—­you don’t mind if I call you that, do you?  I shall have to, in any event, because I like you so tremendously now that we are not going to be married—­you have no idea what a night I spent.”

“I consider it most peculiar and unsympathetic of my hair not to have turned gray.  I thought you were going to have me, you see.”

Margaret was far to much astonished to be angry.

“But last night!” she presently echoed, in candid surprise.  “Why, last night you didn’t know I was poor!”

He wagged a protesting forefinger.  “That made no earthly difference,” he assured her.  “Of course, it was the money—­and in some degree the moon—­that induced me to make love to you.  I acted on the impulse of the moment; just for an instant, the novelty of doing a perfectly sensible thing—­and marrying money is universally conceded to come under that head—­appealed to me.  So I did it.  But all the time I was in love with Kathleen Saumarez.  Why, the moment I left you, I began to realise that not even you—­and