"But here is the cause!"

She touched his sleeve. And suddenly, with that touch, all her charm for
him vanished, and he was angry with her for daring to treat him like
those boys by whom she had been surrounded, for daring to think that she
could play upon the worst in him.

"I'm afraid you are mistaken," he said. "I am no cause for your
gratitude."

She looked more cordial and natural even than before.

"But I think you are. For you don't really like me, and yet you come to
see me. That is unselfishness."

"Only supposing what you say were true, and that you did like me."

"I do like you."

She said it quite simply, without emphasis. And even to him it sounded
true.

"Some day perhaps you will know it."

"But--I do not believe it."

He had recovered from the stroke of her greatest weapon, her voice.

"That does not matter. What is matters, not what some one thinks is, or