"Why have you so ostentatiously avoided me, Mr. Siward?" she asked
languidly.

"Well, upon my word!" he said, with a touch of irritation.

"Oh, you are so dreadfully literal!" she shrugged, brushing her
straight, sensitive nose with the pink blossom; "I only said it to give
you a chance. ... If you are going to be stupid, good night!" But she
made no movement to go. ... "Yes, then; I have avoided you. And it doesn't
become you to ask why."

"Because I kissed you?"

"You hint at the true reason so chivalrously, so delicately," she said,
"that I scarcely recognise it." The cool mockery of her voice and the
warm, quick colour tinting neck and face were incongruous. He thought
with slow surprise that she was not yet letter-perfect in her role of
the material triumphant over the spiritual. A trifle ashamed, too, he
sat silent, watching the silken petals fall one by one as she slowly
detached them with delicate, restless lips.

"I am sorry I came," she said reflectively. "You don't know why I came,
do you? Sheer loneliness, Mr. Siward; there is something of the child in
me still, you see. I am not yet sufficiently resourceful to take it out
in a quietly tearful obligato; I never learned how to produce tears. ...
So I came to you." She had stripped the petals from the rose, and now,
tossing the crushed branch from her, she leaned forward and broke from
its stem a heavy, perfumed bud, half unfolded.

"It seems my fate to pass my life in bidding you good night," she said,
straightening up and turning to him with the careless laughter touching
mouth and eyes again. Then, resting her weight on one hand, her smooth,
white shoulder rounded beside her cheek, she looked at him out of
humourous eyes:

"What is it that women find so attractive in you? The man's experienced
insouciance? The boy's unconscious cynicism? The mystery of your
self-sufficiency? The faulty humanity in you? The youth in you already
showing traces of wear that hint of future scars? What will you be at
thirty-five? At forty? ... Ah," she added softly, "what are you now? For
I don't know, and you cannot tell me if you would. ... Out of these little
windows called eyes we look at one another, and study surfaces, and
try to peep into neighbours' windows. But all is dark behind the
windows--always dark, in there where they tell us souls hide."

She laid the shell-pink bud against her cheek that matched it, smiling
with wise sweetness to herself.

"What cou