"Except Trixy?" interrupted Kate, with a silvery laugh.
"Bless you for laughing about it!" said Jermyn, earnestly. "If you can continue to do so, then——"
"One can get accustomed to almost anything," said Kate, with another laugh, although why she laughed she was sure she did not know.
"If 'can' could mean 'will,' and if I could be 'anything'—" said Jermyn. He did not complete the sentence, so Kate looked shyly up at him. They had walked so far that they were beyond the lights of the hotel, but the girl could see that her companion's face, always strong and earnest, seemed intently fixed upon something far ahead. They had walked all the way to the little lighthouse, and just beyond it, and there are few darker places than the base of a lighthouse. The darkness gave Kate courage, so she whispered:
"It shall mean 'will,' if you wish it so."
"Heaven bless you!" Then—what strange influences there are in darkness!—Jermyn threw his arms about Kate and kissed her.
Some student of love has said that kisses gain force by delay. Jermyn's was the first kiss Kate Trewman had ever received from a man who professed to love her, so between astonishment and many other things which she did not understand and could not have called up and thought about at the time had her life depended upon it, she did not resist the kiss nor the several that followed it.
"My angel!" said Jermyn. "You will be my wife?"
"How can I help it?" asked Kate, softly, "after—after what has happened?"
"Hurrah!" sounded a child's voice behind them.