Jefferson Edwardes smiled in the dark, but spoke gravely.

“You call yourself an artificial little flirt.  You haven’t flirted with me.  Why?”

“With you I have talked ten minutes.”  She laughed suddenly as though at some absurd thought.  “Besides, did any woman ever flirt with you?  Can one lie to eyes that see through one?”

“My eyes do see something,” he said.  “They see that you have never had a chance to be your real self.  You have been surrounded by flatterers and sycophants, when you needed sincere and truthful friends.”

“Truthful friends!” She repeated the words after him incredulously.  “I wonder if such things exist.”

“I am one,” he announced bluntly.  “I am going to give back to you the message your hills gave me—­without flattery and without adjectives.”

He came a step nearer and an unaccountable wave of attraction and fear thrilled her—­flooded her heart until her temples burned.  She had been wishing for the coming of a man who would not be clay in her hands.  To Circe all men must have been swine, from the start, save the man who could pass by.  Now, of a sudden, every wile of coquetry became a lost art to Mary Burton.  She felt like an accomplished and intriguing diplomat, facing an adversary who has no secrets to conceal and no interest in the evasions of others.  He roused a new eagerness because she knew intuitively that to mere fascination he would surrender no principle.  With the realization came a sense of surprise and exaltation and timidity, and she spoke slowly with an interval between her words.

“Why—­will—­you—­assume this role?”

“Because—­” his voice was confident and inspired a responsive confidence—­“there is such a thing as a chemistry of souls.  Life is a laboratory where Destiny experiments with test-tubes and reagents.  Powerful ingredients may be mixed without result because they hold in common no element of reaction.  Other ingredients at the instant of mingling turn violet or crimson or explode or burst into flame—­because they were meant to mingle to that end.  Nature says so.  Does the reason matter?”

She asked another question, rather faintly, because she felt herself startlingly lifted on a tide against which it was a useless thing to struggle.  Something in her wanted to sing, and something else wanted to cry.

“I’m afraid chemistry is one of the things they didn’t teach me much about.  Probably because it was useful.  Can you put it in words of one syllable?”

“Yes.”  He was standing close, but he bent nearer and his voice filled and amplified the brevity of his monosyllables.  “In three.  I love you.”

Mary Burton started back, and a low exclamation broke incoherently from her lips.

The man caught both her hands and spoke with tense eagerness.

“You say I have met you in the dark for a few minutes.  True.  I have looked on your face while one match burned out ... but I have dreamed of you ever since I shrined you in my heart—­back there—­long ago by the roadside.  If you are not the woman of my visions, you can be, and I mean that you shall be.  You are a woman trained in the ways of your world.  If you could help it, you would not let a man take your hands in his, like this, at a first meeting—­would you?”