"Yes, you are," answered Helen softly, "but a big, lovable child of whom I am very fond."
Duncan looked into her eyes to see if he could read behind her words, but he only felt the deep, mysterious power which had brought him under her influence that day in Newport. Then he had felt a hopeful, honest love, for a moment, but it had been crushed out by her laughter. Before that he had been a thoughtless boy, taking life as only a holiday frolic. Had she given him her love, he felt that to him life would have been different; but that laughter had chilled his heart, and the hopeful, honest love had gone out forever. She had married and he had loved her again, but it was a feeling of a different sort, for the man who speaks of love to a married woman casts out honesty from his heart. He loved her with a heated longing which her coldness fanned. He wanted to possess her for his own, yet felt that he was balked by his stupidity and cowardice. In her presence he was a shrinking child with the yearning of a man. "Helen," he said, after a moment, "I will not be played with; I am too much in earnest."
"You frighten me by your seriousness," she said, with a roguish tone in her voice. "I like you better when you are angry. It suits you."
"I will not be trifled with, Helen," he said; "you have no right to treat me so."
"I have the right of a billigerent," she laughed. "You declared war, you remember."
"Then I sue for peace."
"And I grant it," she replied softly, putting out her hand. "Come, let us be friends."
Duncan took her hand and pressed it to his lips. He looked up into her tantalizing eyes and felt again the warm impulse of the old love burning in his heart. "I cannot be your friend, Helen," he said passionately, "for I love you."
She drew her hand away quickly and patted his cheek disapprovingly, as she might have patted a child's; then with a little, playful laugh, she said: "don't be silly, you know I don't like it."
Man of the world as he was, without scruples and usually reckless, he felt cowed. For a moment he sat moving his hands nervously; then he looked up and asked in a serious tone: "Why didn't you marry me?"