"The--the trouble?" she stammered. And with a little ashamed laugh she added, "What trouble?"
For a long time he looked at her in silence, at first puzzled, gradually fitting meaning and interpretation to his words and her own. Presently their eyes met, and with her little gruff boyish laugh she came over to the low seat at his knee.
"You see that there is something just a little wrong, then?" she asked.
"Between you and me, Alix?" he questioned in return, his fine hand tight upon hers, and his affectionate, brotherly look searching her face.
"Well, don't you, Peter?" she countered.
"I hadn't noticed anything, my dear, except that you are making a lonely, solitary man a very happy one," he answered, with his grave smile.
"But that--" she contended, with scarlet cheeks, but bravely "--that isn't marriage!"
"What ought marriage be?" he smiled, half humouring her, half concerned.
For answer she looked keenly, almost wistfully, into his face. He had noticed this look more than once of late.
"I don't know," she said softly, after awhile, with a little discouraged shrug of her shoulders. "I always thought that when a man and a woman liked each other--oh, thoroughly--liked the same things, had everything in common, that that was enough. And--for the woman I was a month ago, it would have been enough, Peter!" she added in a puzzled tone.