“I’ll never get enough of you!” he said.  “I can’t believe it yet.”  And added irrelevantly:  “Pin the roses outside.”

She shook her head.  Something in her protested against this too public advertisement of their love.

“I’d rather hold them,” she answered.  “Let’s go on.”  He started the car again.  “Listen, I want to talk to you, seriously.  I’ve been thinking.”

“Don’t I know you’ve been thinking!” he told her exuberantly.  “If I could only find out what’s always going on in that little head of yours!  If you keep on thinking you’ll dry up, like a New England school-marm.  And now do you know what you are?  One of those dusky red roses just ready to bloom.  Some day I’ll buy enough to smother you in ’em.”

“Listen!” she repeated, making a great effort to calm herself, to regain something of that frame of mind in which their love had assumed the proportions of folly and madness, to summon up the scruples which, before she had left home that morning, she had resolved to lay before him, which she knew would return when she could be alone again.  “I have to think —­you won’t,” she exclaimed, with a fleeting smile.

“Well, what is it?” he assented.  “You might as well get it off now.”

And it took all her strength to say:  “I don’t see how I can marry you.  I’ve told you the reasons.  You’re rich, and you have friends who wouldn’t understand—­and your children—­they wouldn’t understand.  I—­I’m nothing, I know it isn’t right, I know you wouldn’t be happy.  I’ve never lived—­in the kind of house you live in and known the kind of people you know, I shouldn’t know what to do.”

He took his eyes off the road and glanced down at her curiously.  His smile was self-confident, exultant.

“Now do you feel better—­you little Puritan?” he said.

And perforce she smiled in return, a pucker appearing between her eyebrows.

“I mean it,” she said.  “I came out to tell you so.  I know—­it just isn’t possible.”

“I’d marry you to-day if I could get a license,” he declared.  “Why, you’re worth any woman in America, I don’t care who she is, or how much money she has.”

In spite of herself she was absurdly pleased.

“Now that is over, we won’t discuss it again, do you understand?  I’ve got you,” he said, “and I mean to hold on to you.”

She sighed.  He was driving slowly now along the sandy road, and with his hand on hers she simply could not think.  The spell of his nearness, of his touch, which all nature that morning conspired to deepen, was too powerful to be broken, and something was calling to her, “Take this day, take this day,” drowning out the other voice demanding an accounting.  She was living—­what did it all matter?  She yielded herself to the witchery of the hour, the sheer delight of forthfaring into the unknown.