suggest what to do,
until Ethel and Milly knocked at the door.

'Isn't it all strange? Don't you think it's strange?' Leonora demanded.

'No,' he said. 'It seems strange, but it isn't really. Such things are
always happening.'

'Are they?' She spoke naively, with a girlish inflection and a girlish
gesture.

'Well, of course!' He smiled gravely, and yet humorously. And his eyes
said: 'What a charming simple thing you are!' And she liked to think of
his superiority over her in experience, knowledge, imperturbability,
breadth of view, and all those kindred qualities which women give to the
men they admire.

They could not talk further on the subject.

'By the by, how's your foot?' he inquired.

'My foot?'

'Yes. You hurt it last night, didn't you, after I'd gone?'

She had completely forgotten the trifling fiction, until it thus rather
startlingly reappeared on his lips. She might easily have let it die
naturally, had she chosen; but she could not choose. She had a whim to
kill it violently, romantically.

'No,' she said, 'I didn't hurt it.'

'It was your husband was telling me.'

She went on joyously and fearfully: 'Some one asked me to dance,
after--after the Blue Danube. And I didn't want to; I couldn't. And so
I said I had hurt my foot. It was just one of those things that one
says, you know!'

He was embarrassed; he had no remark ready. But to preserve appearances
he lowered the corners of his lips and glanced at the copper tea-kettle
through half-closed eyes, feigning to suppress a private amusement. She
was quite aware, however, that she had embarrassed him. And just as, a
minute earlier, she had liked him for his lordly, masculine, philosophic
superiority, so now she liked him for that youthful embarrassment. She
felt that all men were equally child-like to women, and that the most
adorable were the most child-like. 'How little you understand, after
all!' she thought. 'Poor boy, I unlatched the door, and you dared not
push it open! You were afraid of committing an indiscretion. But I will
guide and protect you, and protect us both.'

This was the woman who, half an hour ago, had been exulting in the
adequacy of her common sense. Innocent and enchanting creature, with the
rashness of innocence!

'I guess I couldn't dance again after the Blue Danube, either,' he said
at length, boldly.

She made no answer; perhaps she was a little intimidated; but she looked
at him with eyes and lips full of la