e roadside like that! Openly; before
everybody; with a young man she had never seen twenty-four hours ago.

He jammed in the gear and let the clutch out with such a jerk that the
car leaped forward. Elliott waved his stick again. Mr. Twist responded
by the briefest touch of his cap, and whirred down the road out of
sight.

"Does he mind your sitting here?" asked Elliott.

"It would be very unreasonable," said Anna-Felicitas gently. "One has to
sit somewhere."

And he laughed with delight at this answer as he laughed with delight at
everything she said, and he told her for the twentieth time that she was
the most wonderful person he had ever met, and she settled down to
listen again, after the interruption caused by Mr. Twist, with a ready
ear and the utmost complacency to these agreeable statements, and began
to wonder whether perhaps after all she mightn't at last be about to
fall in love.

In the new interest of this possibility she turned her head to look at
him, and he told her tumultuously--for being a sailor-man he went
straight ahead on great waves when it came to love-making--that her eyes
were as if pansies had married stars.

She turned her head away again at this, for though it sounded lovely it
made her feel a little shy and unprovided with an answer; and then he
said, again tumultuously, that her ear was the most perfect thing ever
stuck on a girl's cheek, and would she mind turning her face to him so
that he might see if she had another just like it on the other side.

She blushed at this, because she couldn't remember whether she had
washed it lately or not--one so easily forgot one's ears; there were so
many different things to wash--and he told her that when she blushed it
was like the first wild rose of the first summer morning of the world.

At this Anna-Felicitas was quite overcome, and subsided into a
condition of blissful, quiescent waiting for whatever might come next.
Fancy her face reminding him of all those nice things. She had seen it
every day for years and years in the looking-glass, and not noticed
anything particular about it. It had seemed to her just a face.
Something you saw out of, and ate with, and had to clean whatever else
you didn't when you were late for breakfast, because there it was and
couldn't be hidden,--an object remote indeed from pansies, and stars,
and beautiful things like that.

She would have liked to explain this to the young man, and point out
that she fe