“Can’t we stay here just a bit?” King asked pleadingly.  “It won’t take us more than an hour to get back if we go along at a fair pace.  We came by a roundabout way.”

With each hour that passed he was realizing more fully how he dreaded the end of this unexpected and absorbing adventure.  So far none of his attempts to pave the way for other meetings, in other towns to which she might be going in the course of her book selling, had resulted in anything satisfactory.  And even now Anne Linton was shaking her head.

“I think I must ask you to take me back now,” she said.  “I want to come into the house where I am staying not later than I usually do.”

So he had to leave the pleasant, vine-clad porch and take his place beside her in the car again.  It did not seem to him that he was having a fair chance.  But he thought of a plan and proceeded to put it into execution.  He drove steadily and in silence until the lights of the nearing city were beginning to show faintly in the twilight, with the sky still rich with colour in the west.  Then, at a certain curve in the road far above the rest of the countryside, he brought the car to a standstill.

“I can’t bear to go on and end this day,” he said in a low voice of regret.  “How can I tell when I shall see you again?  Do you realize that every time I have said a word about our meeting in the future you’ve somehow turned me aside?  Do you want me to understand that you would rather never see me again?”

Her face was toward the distant lights, and she did not answer for a minute.  Then she said slowly:  “I should like very much to see you again, Mr. King.  But you surely understand that I couldn’t make appointments with you to meet me in other towns.  This has happened and it has been very pleasant, but it wouldn’t do to make it keep happening.  Even though I travel about with a book to sell, I—­shall never lose the sense of—­being under the protection of a home such as other girls have.”

“I wouldn’t have you lose it—­good heavens, no!  I only—­well—­” And now he stopped, set his teeth for an instant, and then plunged ahead.  “But there’s something I can’t lose either, and it’s—­you!”

She looked at him then, evidently startled.  “Mr. King, will you drive on, please?” she said very quietly, but he felt something in her tone which for an instant he did not understand.  In the next instant he thought he did understand it.

He spoke hurriedly:  “You don’t know me very well yet, do you?  But I thought you knew me well enough to know that I wouldn’t say a thing like that unless I meant all that goes with it—­and follows it.  You see—­I love you.  If—­if you are not afraid of a man in a plaster jacket—­it’ll come off some day, you know—­I ask you to marry me.”

There was a long silence then, in which King felt his heart pumping away for dear life.  He had taken the bit between his teeth now, certainly, and offered this girl, of whom he knew less than of any human being in whom he had the slightest interest, all that he had to give.  Yet—­he was so sure he knew her that, the words once out, he realized that he was glad he had spoken them.