deed, he of her,
which was probably why they were so interested in each other still.

"Do you know," Tommy said, "what I have told you is really at least
half the truth? If I did not come here to see you disdaining the sun,
I think I did come to see you disdaining me. Odd, is it not, if true,
that a man should travel so far to see a lip curl up?"

"You don't seem to know what brought you," she said.

"It seems so monstrous," he replied, musing. "Oh, yes, I am quite
certain that the curl of the lip is responsible for my being here; it
kept sending me constant telegrams; but what I want to know is, do I
come for the pleasure of the thing or for the pain? Do I like your
disdain, Alice, or does it make me writhe? Am I here to beg you to do
it again, or to defy it?"

"Which are you doing now?" she inquired.

"I had hoped," he said with a sigh, "that you could tell me that."

On another occasion they reached the same point in this discussion,
and went a little beyond it. It was on a wet afternoon, too, when
Tommy had vowed to himself to mend his ways. "That disdainful look is
you," he told her, "and I admire it more than anything in nature; and
yet, Alice, and yet----"

"Well?" she answered coldly, but not moving, though he had come
suddenly too near her. They were on a private veranda of the hotel,
and she was lolling in a wicker chair.

"And yet," he said intensely, "I am not certain that I would not give
the world to have the power to drive that look from your face. That, I
begin to think, is what brought me here."

"But you are not sure," she said, with a shrug of the shoulder.

It stung him into venturing further than he had ever gone with her
before. Not too gently, he took her head in both his hands and forced
her to look up at him. She submitted without a protest. She was
disdainful, but helpless.

"Well?" she said again.

He withdrew his hands, and she smiled mockingly.

"If I thought----" he cried with sudden passion, and stopped.

"You think a great deal, don't you?" she said. She was going now.

"If I thought there was any blood in your veins, you icy woman----"

"Or in your own," said she. But she said it a little fiercely, and he
noticed that.

"Alice," he cried, "I know now. It is to drive that look from your
face that I am here."

She courtesied from the door. She was quite herself again.

But for that moment she had been moved. He was convinced of it, and
his first feeling was of exult