"Certainly not. You know you can say anything you like to me. I'm not a fool."
"Well, here goes, then. I've been noticing lately that you don't stammer any more. Are you being treated for it?"
"No," cried Kate, plainly delighted. "I am treating myself."
"Then, don't!" cried Noel. "Kate, I can't bear it. Yours was the most attractive, the dearest little mannerism--not a bit disagreeable. Your speech, so far from being marred by it, was only made distinctive. I--I feel as if I had lost my Kate!"
His voice sank with unmistakable tenderness at the last words, and Kate stiffened herself, as if prepared for a plunge into ice-water. Finally she caught her breath sufficiently to say, awkwardly:
"If you care, Noel, of course I w-won't."
"If I care!" cried St. Quentin. "Do I care about anything or anybody else in all this world except Kate Howard? Don't talk as if you didn't know it."
"K-know it!" cried Kate, stammering quite honestly. "Indeed," as she told Carolina later, "after that, I'd have stammered if I'd been cured of it fifty times over. A proposal is enough to make any woman stammer!"
"Indeed, and I didn't. I th-thought you were in love with C-Carolina."
"Carolina!" cried Noel. "Carolina! Well, you are blind! As if she would ever look at me, in the first place--"