"Train reached Albany hours late—account of the snow. I had time to think it over, and—what's business when a lady beckons."
"Did I beckon?" she asked demurely. "I thought that I pointed."
"You did," he agreed. "But pointing is vulgar, and I knew that you couldn't be that."
She grinned—the irrepressible Clancy grin that told of the merry heart within her.
"Did you return to New York to apologize for thinking me vulgar," she inquired. Randall had never been so near to winning her admiration. She liked him, of course, thought him trustworthy, dependable, and safe, the possessor of all those qualities which women respect in sons, fathers, brothers, and husbands, but not in suitors. But, for the first time since she had met him—not so long ago, as age reckons, but long enough as youth knows time—he was showing a lightness of touch. He wasn't witty, but, to Clancy, he seemed so, and the soul of wit is not so much its brevity as it is its audience. He seemed witty, for the moment, to Clancy. And so, admirable.
But the lightness left him as quickly as it had come. He shook his head gravely.
"I had time to think it over," he said again. "And—Miss Deane, if I could fall in love with you in a week, so could other men."
"Are you proposing again?" she demanded.
His shoulders were broad; they could carry for two. He was kindly; she forgot that, a moment ago, he hadn't seemed combative. She liked him better than she had. And then, even as she was admiring and liking him, she became conscious that he was restless, uneasy. Instinctively, she knew that it was not because of his love for her; it was because of the man outside.
That she could let Randall leave this house without some sort of explanation of Spofford's queer manner had never been in her thoughts. She knew that Randall would demand an explanation. She knew that he had been conscious of her fright at sight of Spofford.