ill expect you, perhaps, to laugh about the
little adventure, and I would rather she began the laughing you have
been so good."

"All right. But wouldn't my silence make it rather more awkward?"

"I will take care of the awkwardness, thank you. And you promise?"

"Yes, I promise."

"That is very good of you." She put her hand impulsively across the
goat-skin, and gave his, with which he took it in some surprise, a quick
clasp. Then they were both silent, and they got out of the carryall
under Mrs. Westangle's porte-cochere without having exchanged another
word. Miss Shirley did not bow to him or look at him in parting.

X.

Verrian kept seeing before his inner eyes the thin face of the girl,
dimmed rather than lighted with her sick yes. When she should be
stronger, there might be a pale flush in it, like sunset on snow, but
Verrian had to imagine that. He did not find it difficult to imagine
many things about the girl, whom, in another mood, a more judicial mood,
he might have accused of provoking him to imagine them. As it was, he
could not help noting to that second self which we all have about us,
that her confidences, such as they were, had perhaps been too voluntary;
certainly they had not been quite obligatory, and they could not be
quite accounted for, except upon the theory of nerves not yet perfectly
under her control. To be sure, girls said all sorts of things to one,
ignorantly and innocently; but she did not seem the kind of girl who,
in different circumstances, would have said anything that she did not
choose or that she did not mean to say. She had been surprisingly frank,
and yet, at heart, Verrian would have thought she was a very reticent
person or a secret person--that is, mentally frank and sentimentally
secret; possibly she was like most women in that. What he was sure of
was that the visual impression of her which he had received must have
been very vivid to last so long in his consciousness; all through
his preparations for going down to afternoon tea her face remained
subjectively before him, and when he went down and found himself part of
a laughing and chattering company in the library he still found it, in
his inner sense, here, there, and yonder.

He was aware of suffering a little disappointment in Mrs. Westangle's
entire failure to mention Miss Shirley, though he was aware that his
disappointment was altogether unreasonable, and he more reasonably
decided that if she knew anyth