“Wouldn’t such a thing astonish Nina!” she said.

He did not answer; a slight colour tinged the new sunburn on his cheeks.

She laughed to herself, clasped her hands, crossed her slender feet, and bent her eyes on the pool below.

“Marriage,” she said, pursuing her thoughts aloud, “is curiously unnecessary to happiness.  Take our pleasure in each other, for example.  It has, from the beginning, been perfectly free from silliness and sentiment.”

“Naturally,” he said.  “I’m old enough to be safe.”

“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.

“You have said nicer things to me.  That is your reward.  I wonder if you remember any of the nice things you say to me?  Oh, don’t look so hurt and astonished—­because I don’t believe you do. . . .  Isn’t it jolly to sit here and let life drift past us?  Out there in the world”—­she nodded backward toward the open—­“out yonder all that ‘progress’ is whirling around the world, and here we sit—­just you and I—­quite happily, swinging our feet in perfect content and talking nonsense. . . .  What more is there after all than a companionship that admits both sense and nonsense?”

She laughed, turning her chin on her shoulder to glance at him; and when the laugh had died out she still sat lightly poised, chin nestling in the hollow of her shoulder, considering him out of friendly beautiful eyes in which no mockery remained.