He bent that she should not miss his promising smile--twilight was mixing with starlight by now.
"Isn't faith best proved without words, dear?" he asked her. "If you have any in me, this would seem a right good time to prove it. Cease worrying. Trust me. Rest. Isn't everything snug and _au fait_? You have most everything you need--even a chaperone."
"Jane, tell the truth and shame the devil--don't you prefer me to that wall?"
Perhaps his arm did more than his words to persuade her. At any rate, with her head resting against his shoulder, she made admission.
"I do--prefer you to a stone wall, you know."
"And aren't you going to prefer me to everybody and everything? I don't wish to seem to be making love to you, Miss Lauderdale--not just yet. You must admit that I have been very slow and steady."
"But it would help to get that settled now. Aren't you going to prefer me, Jane?"
"I am. That is, I do now--did in fact from that first night when I picked you out of a grand-tier of faces as the one man who----"
"Wait a minute! You say _you_ selected _me_?"
He took her by both shoulders; held her away from him; peered, startled, into her eyes.
"Of course. But it was more instinct than reason that made me----"
"Well, if _you_ selected _me_--" and he replaced that head of hers, veiled in soft, fragrant black, against the spot preferred to the wall--"_I'm_ helpless."
"Hopeless, when I've kissed you once and have hopes that--? Say, I want to be slow and steady, to give you time to realize without being told that you're going to marry me. But if you self-selected me, Jane Lauderdale, maybe you'll notify me as to the soonest possible moment when I'm due to kiss you again."
She drew far enough away to peer into his eyes. Faint-smiling, yet wholly serious, she considered. Then----
"Peter Pape, why not now?" she asked him.
Pape had other reasons than the girl's weariness for persuading her to try for a snatch of the sleep she might need against possible strain on her nerve and endurance ahead. He wished to weigh--well, several interesting observations.
For long after she had accepted his knee as a pillow, the rock floor as a bed, a live-fur rug for her feet and his coat for her coverlet, he pulled on his pipe; returned the dark scowl of the down-drooping night; thought. The while, out-loud observations which had seemed to soothe Polkadot on that previous trip to the block-house recurred to him. More or less monotonously he crooned them over her like a lullaby.