“I sure have worried a lot about you this winter, Pearl,” he said to her that evening as they two sat a little apart from the rest, Gallito, Jose, Hugh and Seagreave, who all clustered about the fire, while Pearl, as usual, had drawn her chair within the warm gloom of the pine-scented shadow.

“Ain’t you silly!” She looked up at him with her heart-shattering, adorable smile.

“I am always about you,” he said.  “You’re all I think of, Pearl, night and day.”

She patted his arm lightly.  “I’ve always got you to depend on anyway, haven’t I, Bob?” Her soft, lazy, sliding voice was itself a caress.

“You sure have.  Anytime, anywhere.  No matter what happens, I can’t ever change, Pearl.  Lord!  You ought to know that by this time.”

“Maybe I do, Bob, and maybe I like knowing it.”

“I hope you do, but it wouldn’t make any difference whether you did or didn’t.  I got to love you.  I guess the cards fell that way for me before I was born and nothing can ever change that layout.”

“You’ve never failed me yet, Bob.”

“And never will.  Oh, Pearl, don’t you, can’t you see your way to marrying me?”

She stirred restlessly, a faintly troubled look shadowing her face.  “There’s so many of me, and I never know what I’m going to do or how I’m going to feel.  I’d just be bound to make you miserable.”

“It wouldn’t be the first time,” he said a little sadly.  “But you see I know you.  I ain’t got any mistaken notions about you, and I love you more than any other man in this life’ll ever do, Pearl.”

Again she moved and looked at him as if his words had roused in her some regret.  “I guess that’s so; but—­it wouldn’t be a square deal.”

“I’ll tend to that,” he urged, “and you’ll just have to know that I’m always loving you, no matter what’s to pay.”

“I—­” she began, but was interrupted by Jose, who bowed low before her.

“Senorita,” grandiosely, “the ladies and your father beg that, unworthy as I am to dance on the same floor as you, that yet, as a compliment to Mr. Flick, we go through some of the Spanish dances together.”

Pearl assented and half rose, but Flick laid a detaining hand on her sleeve.  “She will in a minute,” he said.  “Run along now, Jose, me and Miss Gallito’s got something to talk over.”  He bent close to her again.  “Pearl,” there was the faintest shake in his voice, “what are you going to tell me, now?”

“Oh, Bob,” the regret was in her voice now, “I wish, I wish you didn’t feel that way.  I love you more than ’most anybody in the world—­but not that way.  And—­and I don’t want to lose your love for me.  I like to know it’s there.  I sort of lean up against it.”

He waited a moment or two before answering her, and then his voice was as steady as ever.  “You can always come back to my love for you.  The stars can fall out of the sky and the mountains slide down, but my love for you can’t change, Pearl.  It’s fixed and steady and forever.”