something nice. Violet Granger was leagues away, and a touch of romance could not disquiet or hurt her.
"Indeed I am anxious to hear that you don't," he said, accompanying his remark with a glance of pathetic anxiety.
"Why should I?" she asked.
This simple question placed Dick in a difficulty, and he was glad when she went on without waiting for an answer.
"Indeed I should have no right to. Love is sudden and—and beyond our control, isn't it?"
"And yet," said Dick, "a man is bound to consider so many things."
"I was thinking of a girl's love. She just gives it and thinks of nothing. Doesn't she?" and she looked at him with an appeal to his experience in her eyes.
"Does she?" said Dick, who began to feel uncomfortable.
"And when she has once given it, she never changes."
If this last remark were a generalisation, it was certainly an audacious one, but Dick was thinking only of a personal application. Daisy's words, as he understood their meaning, were working on the better nature which lay below his frivolity. He began to suffer genuine shame and remorse at the idea that he had caused suffering—lasting pain—to this poor unsophisticated child who had loved