“Well—­yes,” she admitted, “I was crying—­if you insist on knowing.  Now that you have so cleverly driven me to admit that, can you also force me to tell you why I was so tearful?”

“Certainly,” he said promptly; “it was something Nina said that made you cry.”

They both laughed.

“Oh, what a come-down!” she said teasingly.  “You knew that before.  But can you force me to confess to you what Nina was saying?  If you can you are the cleverest cross-examiner in the world, for I’d rather perish than tell you—­”

“Oh,” he said instantly, “then it was something about love!”

He had not meant to say it; he had spoken too quickly, and the flush of surprise on the girl’s face was matched by the colour rising to his own temples.  And, to retrieve the situation, he spoke too quickly again—­and too lightly.

“A girl would rather perish than admit that she is in love?” he said, forcing a laugh.  “That is rather a clever deduction, I think.  Unfortunately, however, I happen to know to the contrary, so all my cleverness comes to nothing.”

The surprise had faded from her face, but the colour remained; and with it something else—­something in the blue eyes which he had never before encountered there—­the faintest trace of recoil, of shrinking away from him.

And she herself did not know it was there—­did not quite realise that she had been hurt.  Surprise that he had chanced so abruptly, so unerringly upon the truth had startled and confused her; but that he had made free of the truth so lightly, so carelessly, laughingly amused, left her without an answering smile.

That it had been an accident—­a chance surmise which perhaps he himself did not credit—­which he could not believe—­made it no easier for her.  For the first time in his life he had said something which left her unresponsive, with a sense of bruised delicacy and of privacy invaded.  A tinge of fear of him crept in, too.  She did not misconstrue what he had said under privilege of a jest, but after what had once passed between them she had not considered that love, even in the abstract, might serve as a mocking text for any humour or jesting sermon from a man who had asked her what he once asked—­the man she had loved enough to weep for when she had refused him only because she lacked what he asked for.  Knowing that she loved him in her own innocent fashion, scarcely credulous that he ever could be dearer to her, yet shyly wistful for whatever more the years might add to her knowledge of a love so far immune from stress or doubt or the mounting thrill of a deeper emotion, she had remained confidently passive, warmly loyal, reverencing the mystery of the love he offered, though she could not understand it or respond.

And now—­now a chance turn; of a word—­a trend to an idle train of thought, jestingly followed!—­and, without warning, they had stumbled on a treasured memory, too frail, too delicately fragile, to endure the shock.