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you imagine I don’t know that under that cool little manner of yours there’s fire? I can’t be in a room two minutes with you without wanting to kiss you.”

He came a step nearer to her. Ann still held the sizzling meat dish. “No man can attempt to kiss a woman who holds a pan of boiling fat in her hands,” she reflected thankfully.

“Don’t make me upset the mutton,” she remarked calmly. “Go on shelling the peas.”

“Very well—perhaps it’s wiser. We know the proverb about idle hands.”

Ann couldn’t hold the meat dish for ever, but she now began an interminable basting of the joint. It was a most ridiculous situation, and yet she knew that the real and vital moments of life often occur at curiously incongruous periods. They do not wait for the stage to be set—the scene rehearsed.

“You’ve come to mean more to me than any woman I’ve ever known,” he went on. “Kissing you that night sent me mad. Will you marry me?”

Ann was so intensely astonished at this abrupt proposal, that she narrowly escaped burning herself with the basting speon; but she still had sufficient command over her voice to answer in a matter-of-fact tone:

“I’m sorry, but I can’t.”

“Why can’t you?”

“I don’t love you.”

“You let me kiss you.”

“I daresay you’ve kissed quite a number of people you didn’t love.”

“Have you?”

“Not a number. Three to be accurate.”

“And I’m one of them?”