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 her hands clasped upon his breast again and a look of devotion in her eyes.

"Just this, Fay," he answered gravely. "I love you with all my heart and with all of my life, and I want you to love me. . . . Do you?"

"Do I?" she reflected aloud. "Why, yes, George, I—" She hesitated a moment, then gazed at him with a shy but enlarging smile. "Why, of course, I love you," she admitted naïvely, "now—now that you ask me," and the long lashes were lowered to her blushing cheeks. "Who could help loving you?"

"You darling!" he murmured, and gave her the slow, reverent kiss he had meant to give at first; then stood regarding her with a kind of holy contemplation. He thrilled with the greatest happiness he had ever known. It was like—like what he had thought it would be. He had won her—and he was panting from the effort as a man might be expected to pant after a twelve-year chase.

In another instant he was exulting, male-like, over his conquest. He had made this wonderful girl love him. His head straightened, a very proud feeling came into his breast, and he glanced about him over her shoulder like a man who had conquered the world—the richest, widest, most wonderful world—the world of a woman's heart; and that heart was now pulsing against his own with a steady rhythm that was