St. Martin's Summer Part 45

"I am peevish and cross-grained," he informed her, "and I have grown old in ignorance of woman's ways. Love has never come to me until now. What manner of lover, think you, can I make?"

Her eyes were on the windows at his back. The sunshine striking through them seemed to give her the reply she sought.

"To-morrow will be Saint Martin's Day," she told him; "yet see with a warmth the sun is shining."

"A poor, make-believe Saint Martin's Summer," said he. "I am fitly answered by your allegory."

"Oh, not make-believe, not make-believe," she exclaimed. "There is no make-believe in the sun's brightness and its warmth. We see it and we feel it, and we are none the less glad of it because the time of year should be November; rather do we take the greater joy in it. And it is not yet November in your life, not yet by many months."

"What you say is apt, perhaps," said he, "and may seem more apt than it is since my name is Martin, though I am no saint." Then he shook off this mood that he accounted selfish; this mood that would take her--as the wolf takes the lamb--with no thought but for his own hunger.

"No, no!" he cried out. "It were unworthy in me!"

"When I love you, Martin?" she asked him gently.

A moment he stared at her, as if through those clear eyes he would penetrate to the very depths of her maiden soul. Then he sank on to his knees before her as any stripling lover might have done, and kissed her hands in token of the fact that he was conquered.