“I can’t let you do it because—­because I didn’t know what it was like until that first time,” she protested, while two large tears rolled from her eyes.

Softened by her confusion, his genial smile shone on her for an instant before the gloom returned to his features.  The last few weeks had preyed on his nerves until he told himself that he could no longer control the working of his emotions.  The solitude, the emptiness of his days, the restraint put upon him by his invalid mother—­all these engendered a condition of mind in which any transient fancy might develop into a winged fury of impulse.  There were times when his desire for Blossom’s beauty appeared to fill the desolate space, and he hungered and thirsted for her actual presence at his side.  In the excitement of a great city, he would probably have forgotten her in a month after their first meeting.  Here, in this monotonous country, there was nothing for him but to brood over each trivial detail until her figure stood out in his imagination edged by the artificial light he had created around it.  Her beauty, which would have been noticeable even in a crowd, became goddess-like against the low horizon in the midst of the November colours.

“If you only knew how I suffer from you, darling,” he said, “I haven’t slept for nights because you refused to kiss me.”

“I—­I haven’t slept either,” she faltered.

“Because of me, Blossom?”

“I begin to think and it makes me so unhappy.”

“Oh, damn it!  Do you love me, Blossom?”

“What difference does it make whether I do or not?”

“It makes all the difference under Heaven!  Would you like to love me, Blossom?”

“I oughtn’t to let myself think of it, and I don’t when I can help it.”

“But can you help it?  Tell me, can you help it?”

Turning away from him, she cast a startled glance under the willows in the direction of the house.

“I must be going back.  They will miss me.”

“Don’t you think I shall miss you, Beauty?”

“I don’t know.  I haven’t thought.”

“If you knew how miserable I’ll be after you have left me, you’d kiss me once before you go.”

“Don’t ask me, I can’t—­I really can’t, Mr. Jonathan.”

“Hang Mr. Jonathan and all that appertains to him!  What’s to become of me, condemned to this solitude, if you refuse to become kind to me?  By Jove, if it wasn’t for my mother, I’d ask you to marry me!”

“I don’t want to marry you,” she responded haughtily, and completed her triumph.  Something stronger than passion—­that something compounded partly of moral fibre, partly of a phlegmatic temperament, guided her at the critical moment.  His words had been casual, but her reception of them charged them with seriousness almost before he was aware.  A passing impulse was crystallized by the coldness of her manner into a permanent desire.