“So much as marry me in particular?”

Her smile was as for true directness.  “I might get what I want for less.”

“You think it so much for you to do?”

“Yes,” she presently said, “I think it’s a great deal.”

Then it was that, though she was so gentle, so quite perfect with him, and he felt he had come on far—­then it was that of a sudden something seemed to fail and he didn’t quite know where they were.  There rose for him, with this, the fact, to be sure, of their disparity, deny it as mercifully and perversely as she would.  He might have been her father.  “Of course, yes—­that’s my disadvantage:  I’m not the natural, I’m so far from being the ideal match to your youth and your beauty.  I’ve the drawback that you’ve seen me always, so inevitably, in such another light.”

But she gave a slow headshake that made contradiction soft—­made it almost sad, in fact, as from having to be so complete; and he had already, before she spoke, the dim vision of some objection in her mind beside which the one he had named was light, and which therefore must be strangely deep.  “You don’t understand me.  It’s of all that it is for you to do—­it’s of that I’m thinking.”

Oh, with this, for him, the thing was clearer!  “Then you needn’t think.  I know enough what it is for me to do.”

But she shook her head again.  “I doubt if you know.  I doubt if you can.”

“And why not, please—­when I’ve had you so before me?  That I’m old has at least that fact about it to the good—­that I’ve known you long and from far back.”

“Do you think you’ve ‘known’ me?” asked Charlotte Stant.  He hesitated—­for the tone of it, and her look with it might have made him doubt.  Just these things in themselves, however, with all the rest, with his fixed purpose now, his committed deed, the fine pink glow, projected forward, of his ships, behind him, definitely blazing and crackling—­this quantity was to push him harder than any word of her own could warn him.  All that she was herself, moreover, was so lighted, to its advantage, by the pink glow.  He wasn’t rabid, but he wasn’t either, as a man of a proper spirit, to be frightened.  “What is that then—­if I accept it—­but as strong a reason as I can want for just learning to know you?”

She faced him always—­kept it up as for honesty, and yet at the same time, in her odd way, as for mercy.  “How can you tell whether if you did you would?”

It was ambiguous for an instant, as she showed she felt.  “I mean when it’s a question of learning, one learns sometimes too late.”

“I think it’s a question,” he promptly enough made answer, “of liking you the more just for your saying these things.  You should make something,” he added, “of my liking you.”

“I make everything.  But are you sure of having exhausted all other ways?”

This, of a truth, enlarged his gaze.  “But what other ways?”