He was set, so that he would not have realized, now, that he had set before. This was a universe away from that. She knew that, the other one.... She'd been kind.... It wasn't that she hadn't liked him, he believed. She had begun to like him near her, she had liked it when he said "darling." Ah, to think that he had ever wanted to say "darling" to any woman before! Here was his darling, and she must be made to see it, not later, not in London, but "right here and now."
As he twisted the ribbon, he spoke in the tone that had caused that other woman to shut her eyes; for it was the note of the mating call.
"I say, darling——"
Again the girl shook her head, but—was there now the least quiver of indecision in her gesture?
"I say, if nobody else has ever been allowed to call you that——"
"Oh, no!" she cried, sincerity itself.
He was mechanically twisting up that ribbon between them; another inch he took, another.
"Then if there's nobody else you liked well enough for that, there's a chance for me," persisted the soft husky voice of her lover above the faint distant crashing of those breakers behind them.
"Shall I tell you what?"
"What——?" she asked, slowly, no longer looking at him. A kind of arrogance seemed to shine up in him. Somewhere deep down in his heart he was cheering himself on by the reminder that he knew more than she. He seemed vaguely conscious of some force upon his side.... He would not have believed anyone who had told him that a woman's strongest love, poured out upon him, had lent him magnetism, charged him. He fastened his blue eyes upon this girl, as upon some doggedly desired objective seen from his battle 'plane as he drove through the blue, but he did not reply. He smiled, with all that is far-away in those searching eyes of his.