“No, no!” she said. “You mustn’t say that! It’s good, I know it is!”

At that he laughed, but he was pleased, secretly.

“All right, go on with it. Only when you’ve come to the end, be candid with me!”

“Very well.” She looked up at him. “Sometimes it puzzles me because I can’t imagine that you really wrote it. Is it really you?”

He thought for a moment.

“I believe so—most of it. It’s difficult to probe beneath one’s self-deceit, but—yes, I think it’s me. So if you don’t like it after all, it’ll mean you don’t like me.”

She shook her head.

“No, for I shall know that the parts I don’t like aren’t really you.”

“They’re probably more me than the parts you do like,” he said seriously, but again she shook her head.

For him her fascination grew, till it was sweet to see her quietly sitting by the fire with the red light from the coals casting her profile into relief against the dark wall. It was sweeter still to dance with her and to feel her slim body in his arms, young and fragrant, and to look down into her face so near to his. He loved the dark hair bound closely to her head, and her lashes curling upward, or lying still against the cream of her skin, shading her eyes. He was awed in her presence, loving her innocence and the little ingenuous things that she said. Her silences seemed fraught with deep reflection; he wondered what were her thoughts, and what lay behind the softness of her eyes. That they were gentle, like herself, he knew, very young perhaps, and perhaps a little shy.

She was aloof with him, retreating within herself. Sentimental he thought, how virginal! She could never be intimate with him as other girls would be. She would bring everything there was in her, all her thoughts and her fancies, all the places in her soul kept secret, unspoiled to her husband. Then, as he saw her, in imagination, a bride, his hands clenched and his breath came faster, and he thought of the treasures that were hers to unfold, the frailty, and the exquisite purity. Young and immature she was, too young and too sweet to hold strong alien opinions, young enough to be yet plastic, with intelligence to comprehend and to absorb a man’s teaching.

It would be joy to lay a guiding, artist’s hand on her mind still unformed, joy, greater still, to be sure, as he was sure, that no other man’s lips had touched hers, to know that she was wholly his, with no old, forgotten flirtations lying behind her.