e:

"Months--so many months, you know, since we met!" And I thought it
delightful the way she puckered her lovely little forehead and looked me
over. But she just looked so devilish enticing, I couldn't keep it up
myself. I leaned nearer and spoke behind my hat, trying to look the love
I felt.

"Didn't expect to see me, did you?"

She looked at me oddly and bit her lip. But her eyes were dancing and
the delicious dimple in her cheek twitched on the verge of laughter. She
shook her head.

"Indeed I did not." And again came that odd look in her face as though
she were studying, kind of balking, don't you know. By Jove, she was
perfectly dazzling!

"My dearest!" slipped softly from me as I held the hat.

She stared. Then once more that canary peal of merriment.

"Oh, dear!" Then her face sobered and she almost pouted. "Now you
mustn't--please, _really_--it gets so tiresome. Don't you American, or
rather, you Harvard men, ever talk anything to a girl but love? Why,
it's absurd." She smiled, but her lashes dropped reproof. By Jove, I was
taken back a little! Evidently she was piqued with me about something,
but what the devil was it? And then I thought I had it.

I slipped nearer--to the edge of the chair.

"I didn't know you were in town to-day--'pon honor, I didn't. Billings
never said a word about it," I explained. "Why, dash it, I would have
given _anything_ to have known."

She looked at me with a queer little smile, stroked her little lip with
the point of one gloved finger and looked across the river at the
Palisades. Dash the Palisades! Never could see any sense in them,
anyhow!

"Oh, thank you, but Elizabeth and I didn't know ourselves until last
evening that we would make the New York trip. She wanted to hear a
suffragette lecture at the Carnegie, and I had some shopping to do."

And she just gave me one of those calm, self-contained, thoroughbred
sort of smiles that are harder to get past than a six-foot hedge. What
the deuce _was_ the matter with the girl? Something had changed her; yet
I knew that nothing could really change her at heart--never.

But it was certain that she was put out about something. I would just
have to play her easy and try to find out what it was. I remembered
hearing Pugsley say--and he has had no end of experience with them--that
when women are put out they expect you to find out what it is, no matter
how devilishly improbable or unreasonable it may be.

And just then I