"No," answered Nina, nestling her fingers closer and speaking in a warm, low voice. "No, he's really dead. He was cleaning his guns and one was loaded. So careless in his boy, wasn't it? No, it's quite all so. Really, I am marriageable, eligible, and all the rest of it."
Carleigh kissed the nestling fingers. "To think that I ever fancied I knew what love was before!" he murmured. "You dear! You darling! May I call you Nina?"
"But you've called me Nina three times already since luncheon."
"Have I? I didn't know it. Dearest, I do not know what I am doing or saying any more. You have me wound all in and out around these fingers.
"Do you know, I thought I knew a little bit about love and about women, and about what men and women could mean to one another. But I was a baby at the game. I knew the lines, don't you know, but I didn't know their expressiveness. I was a child playing with the letters of the alphabet."
"You saw the symbols, but you didn't know their meaning?"
"Exactly so."
"But now you know."
"Now I know."
Nina hugged herself seductively together. "Isn't it deliciously, delightfully dangerous to sit like this and think that if any one should appear anywhere there would be such an outbreak of talk as would even cause last month to pale with envy?"