He laughed amusedly.

“The wonder is that you ever came to care for me.  You do care, don’t you, beloved?”

She looked up at him earnestly.

“Dear, do I seem forward, bold?  But our time together is too short for pretence.  Yes, I do care.  I love you?  I seem to have always loved you.  Or at least to have waited always to love you.  I don’t think I knew what love was until now.  Until now.  Now I do know.”

She paused and stared across the room, seeing the vision of her childhood, her girlhood.  From outside came intermittent shouts and an occasional random shot.  But she did not hear them.

“As a child, as a schoolgirl, even afterwards, I used to day-dream.  I used to wonder if any one would ever love me, ever teach me what love is.  I dreamt of a Fairy Prince who would come to me one day, of a strong, brave, tender man who would care for me, who would want me to care for him.  I often laughed at myself for it afterwards.  For in London men all seemed so very unlike my dream-hero.”

She turned her face to him and looked tenderly at him.

“But when I met you,” she continued, “I think I knew that you were He.  But I never dared hope that you would learn to care for me.”

“Dearest heart,” he replied, “I think I must have fallen in love with you the first moment I saw you.  I can see you now as you stood surrounded by the elephants, a delightful but most unexpected vision in the jungle.”

“Did you—­oh, did you really like me that very first day?” she asked eagerly.  At the moment the answer seemed to her the most important thing in the world.

As a lover will do Dermot deceived himself and imagined that his love had been born at the first sight of her.  He told her so; and the girl forgot the imminent, deadly peril about them in the glow of happiness that warms the heart of a loving woman who hears that she has been beloved from the beginning.

“But I looked so absurd,” she said dreamily; “so untidy, when you first saw me.  Why, my hair was all down.”

He laughed again; but the laughter died from his lips as the remembrance of their situation returned to him.  Death was ordinarily little to him; though now life could be so sweet since she loved him.  It seemed a terrible thing that this young girl must die so soon—­and probably by his own hand to save her from a worse fate.

She guessed his thoughts.

“Is this really the end, dear?” she asked, unwilling but unafraid to meet death.  “Is there no hope for us?”

“I fear not, beloved.”

“I—­I don’t want to die so soon.  Before you came tonight I wouldn’t have minded very much; for I was not happy.  But now it’s a little hard, just as this wonderful thing has happened to me.”

She sighed.  He held out his arms again, and she crept into them and nestled into his embrace.

“Well, if it must be so, I’ll try to be worthy of my soldier and not disgrace you, dear,” she said fondly, bravely.  “Let’s try to forget it for a while and not let it spoil our last hours together.  Let’s ‘make-believe,’ as the children say.  Let’s pretend that this is all a hideous nightmare, that our lives and our love are before us.”