“Why not?” She looked frankly up at him.  “I am not afraid.”

“I am afraid for you.”  He spoke seriously.

“Why?” she inquired again.

He knelt beside her, looking directly into her eyes.  “For many reasons,” he said.  “But above all else, because I love you.”

The fingers of her clasped hands tightened until they strained, and she looked straight away across the clearing.  The moon was bright now, and the thought-furrow showed deep between her brows, but she said nothing.

The tree-tops whispered, and the girl shivered slightly.  He bent forward and folded the cape across her throat.  Still she did not move.

“Cara, I love you,” he repeated insistently.

“Don’t—­I can’t listen.”  Her voice was one of forced calm.  Then, turning suddenly, she laid her hand on his arm.  It trembled violently under her touch.  “And, oh, boy,” she broke out, with a voice of pent-up vibrance, “don’t you see how I want to listen to you?”

He bent forward until he was very close, and his tone was almost fierce in its tense eagerness.

“You want to!  Why?”

Again a tremor seized her, then with the sudden abandon of one who surrenders to an impulse stronger than one’s self, she leaned forward and placed a hand on each of his shoulders, clutching him almost wildly.  Her eyes glowed close to his own.

“Because I love you, too,” she said.  Then, with a break in her voice:  “Oh, you knew that!  Why did you make me say it?”

While the stars seemed to break out in a chorus above him, he found his arms about her, and was vaguely conscious that his lips were smothering some words her lips were trying to shape.  Words seemed to him just then so superfluous.

There was a tumult of pounding pulses in his veins, responsive to the fluttering heart which beat back of a crushed rose in the lithe being he held in his arms.  Then he obeyed the pressure of the hands on his shoulders and released her.

“Why should you find it so hard to say?” He asked.

She sat for a moment with her hands covering her face.

“You must never do that again,” she said faintly.  “You have not the right.  I have not the right.”

“I have the only right,” he announced triumphantly.

She shook her head.  “Not when the girl is engaged.”

She looked at him with a sad droop at the corners of her lips.  He sat silent—­waiting.

“Listen!” She spoke wearily, rising and leaning against the rough bole of the tree at her back, with both hands tightly clasped behind her.  “Listen and don’t interrupt, because it’s hard, and I want to finish it.”  Her words came slowly with labored calm, almost as if she were reciting memorized lines.  “It sounds simple from your point of view.  It is simple from mine, but desperately hard.  Love is not the only thing.  To some of us there is something else that must come first.  I am engaged, and I shall marry the man to whom I am engaged.  Not because I want to, but because—­” her chin went up with the determination that was in her—­“because I must.”