“I want you for my wife, dear,” was all he said.

Then Damaris pulled her hands away and, removing the yashmak, looked up into his face, whilst he drew a breath sharply at the beauty of her.

“I love you so, dear!  I’m a clumsy fool at speaking, but I could show you how I love you.  I want to marry you and take you right away home.  Do you know, I—­I don’t know how to explain it, but I—­somehow feel you are in danger out here.  I--will you------?”

Damaris looked to the right and looked to the left, hesitated and chose the middle path.

“I can’t answer you now, Ben.  I’m—­I’m not sure about loving you, and, of course, one can’t marry without that on both sides, can one?”

Oh, the blessed little ignoramus!

“Besides,” she added as an afterthought, “I’m so young, and so are you.”

“Oh, Damaris!  Surely you don’t want to wait until you find someone who’s had lots of experience, which only means that he hasn’t been playing the game as far as his future wife is concerned and will come to you like a ready-made suit returned from the cleaner’s.  The Kelhams always marry young, and our brides are always very young.  That’s why, I think, we’re so strong and long-lived.”  He veered suddenly from the mazy subject of eugenics and pleaded hard, persuasively, stubbornly.

But Damaris, just as stubbornly, shook her head.

“Besides, Ben, this is unexpected.  I haven’t seen anything of you since I have been out; surely, if you love me so, you would have come over more often to—­to—­prepare the way.”

She unashamedly exposed her hurt, whilst the man inwardly called himself every kind of a fool for having listened to another’s voice upon a subject as vital and tricky as love.

Still he urged and pleaded, being of those who, refusing to take No as an answer, usually succeed in attaining their desire.

A wearisome process, but well worth while once in a lifetime, whatever kind of a clutter those first cousins, obstinacy, stubbornness and strong will cause you to accumulate about your feet at other times.

“I don’t know enough to marry,” persisted the girl.  “I want to know what love really is, first.”

“Oh! but, dear, I can teach you all you want to know,” replied the man, in the customary all-sweeping manner of the male.

“But I want to know all about the different kinds.”

“There are no different kinds, Damaris.  There is only one sort.”

“Then explain this to me.”

It seemed that two months before the girl had left England, she had found the tweeny, Lizzie Stitch by name, sobbing over the cinders in her sitting-room grate.  The besmirched little face, like a sodden little pudding, had been covered with grimy hands, and the thin little chest had heaved under the scanty cotton blouse and the stress of the tale of betrayal and desertion.

“I didn’t know, miss.  I didn’t do it purposelike for a lark.  I did think it was love, real love what—­what is h’always pardinned.  Well, miss, if you think it wise to force ’im, I’ll do what you say, though it’s not about meself as I’m worrying; it’s ’cause I must have a father for the kid.  I couldn’t put it out, an’ lose it, not h’ever so.”