"
"Of course, you would have stayed if you had known, Captain Selwyn?" She
was still smiling.
"Of course," he replied.
"Would you really?"
"Why, yes."
There was something not perfectly familiar to him in the girl's bright
brevity, in her direct personal inquiry; for between them, hitherto, the
gaily impersonal had ruled except in moments of lightest badinage.
"Was it an amusing dinner?" she asked, in her turn.
"Rather." Then he looked up at her, but she had stretched her slim
silk-shod feet to the fender, and her head was bent aside, so that he
could see only the curve of the cheek and the little close-set ear
under its ruddy mass of gold.
"Who was there?" she asked, too, carelessly.
For a moment he did not speak; under his bronzed cheek the flat muscles
stirred. Had some meddling, malicious fool ventured to whisper an unfit
jest to this young girl? Had a word--or a smile and a phrase cut in
two--awakened her to a sorry wisdom at his expense? Something had
happened; and the idea stirred him to wrath--as when a child is wantonly
frightened or a dumb creature misused.
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