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132 against a white gum-tree, tapping her riding skirt with her whip in an embarrassed manner.

"Mr. Blake," she began.

"Well, Miss Valliant."

"You were wrong—in what you said—in what you thought. I am not engaged to Mr. Frank Hallett."

"Ah ! I wonder whether that is so much the better for him, or the worse."

"The worse. I am not the kind of girl to make a man happy."

"I think you might make a certain kind of man intensely happy—and under certain conditions."

"What conditions?"

"First of all, he must be free to love you—free to make you his wife. And yet "—he paused for a moment, then went on—"I can imagine the desperate sort of joy—a joy in which minutes would count as years, and a week as a lifetime—the joy of loving you, and conquering you, and teaching you the ineffable bliss of love—opening to you a whole world of new emotions and gathering the first fruits of your heart, with bliss intensified to an ecstasy of pain by the knowledge that it must end in a week. Perhaps that short-lived rapture might be worth more than a long married life of decorous commonplace conventional happiness, a Frank Hallett kind of happiness."

"Don't, don't say things like that. I don't know anything about such feelings."

"No, but the time will come when you will know, and then you will remember my words. You will remember that it was as I told you, that you had in you the capacity for passion."

"Yes," she answered in a low voice; "I will remember."

"You understand now what I meant when I told you that I realized the risk I was running."

"No," she exclaimed. "You talk in enigmas. You speak of a certain kind of man—of certain conditions which don't apply to you."