atched away her hand.

"You didn't post my letter? You kept it back on purpose? And you tell
me so NOW, to prove to me that I'd better put myself under your
protection?" She burst into a laugh that had in it all the piercing
echoes of her Murrett past, and her face, at the same moment, underwent
the same change, shrinking into a small malevolent white mask in which
the eyes burned black. "Thank you--thank you most awfully for
telling me! And for all your other kind intentions! The plan's
delightful--really quite delightful, and I'm extremely flattered and
obliged."

She dropped into a seat beside her dressing-table, resting her chin on
her lifted hands, and laughing out at him under the elf-lock which had
shaken itself down over her eyes.

Her outburst did not offend the young man; its immediate effect was that
of allaying his agitation. The theatrical touch in her manner made his
offense seem more venial than he had thought it a moment before.

He drew up a chair and sat down beside her. "After all," he said, in a
tone of good-humoured protest, "I needn't have told you I'd kept back
your letter; and my telling you seems rather strong proof that I hadn't
any very nefarious designs on you."

She met this with a shrug, but he did not give her time to answer. "My
designs," he continued with a smile, "were not nefarious. I saw you'd
been through a bad time with Mrs. Murrett, and that there didn't seem
to be much fun ahead for you; and I didn't see--and I don't yet see--the
harm of trying to give you a few hours of amusement between a depressing
past and a not particularly cheerful future." He paused again, and then
went on, in the same tone of friendly reasonableness: "The mistake I
made was not to tell you this at once--not to ask you straight out to
give me a day or two, and let me try to make you forget all the things
that are troubling you. I was a fool not to see that if I'd put it to
you in that way you'd have accepted or refused, as you chose; but that
at least you wouldn't have mistaken my intentions.--Intentions!" He
stood up, walked the length of the room, and turned back to where she
still sat motionless, her elbows propped on the dressing-table, her chin
on her hands. "What rubbish we talk about intentions! The truth is I
hadn't any: I just liked being with you. Perhaps you don't know how
extraordinarily one can like being with you...I was depressed and adrift
myself; and you made me forget my bothers; and