“Why, when you settle down with a wife, and—­shall we say six children?” she queried, merrily—­“Yes, I think it must be six!  Like the Sieur Amadis!  And when you forget that you ever sat with me under the trees, holding my hand—­so!”

The lovely, half-laughing compassion of her look nearly upset his self-possession.  He drew closer to her side.

“Innocent!” he exclaimed, passionately—­“if you would only listen to reason—­”

She shook her head.

“I never could!” she declared, with an odd little air of penitent self-depreciation—­“People who ask you to listen to reason are always so desperately dull!  Even Priscilla!—­when she asks you to ‘listen to reason,’ she’s in the worst of tempers!  Besides, Robin, dear, we shall have plenty of chances to ‘listen to reason’ when we grow older,—­we’re both young just now, and a little folly won’t hurt us.  Have patience with me!—­I want to tell you some quite unreasonable—­quite abnormal things about love!  May I?”

“Yes—­if I may too!” he answered, kissing the hand he held, with lingering tenderness.

The soft colour flew over her cheeks,—­she smiled.

“Poor Robin!” she said—­“You deserve to be happy and you will be! —­not with me, but with some one much better, and ever so much prettier!  I can see you as the master of Briar Farm—­such a sweet home for you and your wife, and all your little children running about in the fields among the buttercups and daisies—­a pretty sight, Robin!—­I shall think of it often when—­when I am far away!”

He was about to utter a protest,—­she stopped him by a gesture.

“Hush!” she said.

And there was a moment’s silence.

CHAPTER VI

“When I think about love,” she began presently, in a soft dreamy voice—­“I’m quite sure that very few people ever really feel it or understand it.  It must be the rarest thing in all the world!  This poor Sieur Amadis, asleep so long in his grave, was a true lover, —­and I will tell you how I know he had said good-bye to love when he married.  All those books we found in the old dower-chest, that day when we were playing about together as children, belonged to him—­some are his own compositions, written by his own hand,—­the others, as you know, are printed books which must have been difficult to get in his day, and are now, I suppose, quite out of date and almost unknown.  I have read them all!—­my head is a little library full of odd volumes!  But there is one—­a manuscript book—­which I never tire of reading,—­it is a sort of journal in which the Sieur Amadis wrote down many of his own feelings—­ sometimes in prose, sometimes in verse—­and by following them carefully and piecing them together, it is quite easy to find out his sadness and secret—­how he loved once and never loved again—­”

“You can’t tell that,” interrupted Robin—­“men often say they can only love once—­but they love ever so many times—­”