"Everything—except——"

"Except what?"

She looked up at him with clear grey eyes, a trifle daunted.

"Forget everything except that I—like you, Mr. Sayre."

He said: "That is the sweetest and most fearless thing a woman ever said. I am absurdly happy over it."

She waited, looking down at her linked fingers.

"And," he said, "for the first time in all my life I have cared more for what a woman has said to me than I care for anything on earth."

There was a good deal of the poet in William Sayre.

"Do you mean it?" she asked, tremulously.

"I mean more."