"You are not!" she retorted. "What a ridiculous thing to say!"
"Well, then," he said, "I'm dreadfully unsafe, but yet you've managed to escape. Is that it?"
"Perhaps. You are attractive to women! I've heard that often enough to be convinced. Why, even I can see what attracts them"—she turned to look at him—"the way your head and shoulders set—and—well, the—rest. . . . It's rather superior of me to have escaped sentiment, don't you think so?"
"Indeed I do. Few—few escape where many meet to worship at my frisky feet, and this I say without conceit is due to my mustachios. Tangled in those like web-tied flies, imprisoned hearts complain in sighs—in fact, the situation vies with moments in Boccaccio."
Her running comment was her laughter, ringing deliciously amid the trees until a wild bird, restlessly attentive, ventured a long, sweet response from the tangled green above them.
After their laughter the soberness of reaction left them silent for a while. The wild bird sang and sang, dropping fearlessly nearer from branch to branch, until in his melody she found the key to her dreamy thoughts.
"Because," she said, "you are so unconscious of your own value, I like you best, I think. I never before quite realised just what it was in you."
"My value," he said, "is what you care to make it."
"Then nobody can afford to take you away from me, Captain Selwyn."
He flushed with pleasure: "That is the prettiest thing a woman ever admitted to a man," he said.