“Do not let us play any longer,’ she said. ‘Let us be in earnest.’”
“Only less painful,” he interrupted again.
“Sometimes not,” she said, with a look that silenced him. “Sometimes much more so—my Cousin Maude, for example.”
“Hip, hip, hurrah for the mosquito!” he murmured. They laughed softly together. Then she grew earnest, and looked so grave that he became serious too.
“There is always a purpose,” she said, with a touch of some feeling which he had never guessed at. “If you and I have met, it is because we are to have some influence over one another. I can’t just see how; I can’t form any idea—”
“I can,” he said eagerly.
She looked up so suddenly and steadily that he was silent.
“Do not let us play any longer,” she said. “Let us be in earnest.”
“But I am in earnest,” he asseverated.