“I’m sure I don’t wonder,” said Lord Anthony, who was recovering his good temper, which was never lost for long.
“And so I came out. You will have tea here, Maddie, won’t you, like a duck?”
“I’m not sure that ducks care for tea,” rejoined Madeline. “Their weakness is snails. But I’ll run in and order it. It must be after five.” And in another minute her tall white figure was half-way to the castle, and Miss Pamela and Lord Anthony were alone.
Both were eager to question the other in a delicate, roundabout way. Strange to say, the man got out his query first. Throwing himself once more into a chair, and crossing his legs, he said—
“Girls know girls and their affairs, as men know men, and are up to their little games. Now, you saw a lot of Miss West in town. Same dressmaker, same dentist, same bootmaker. Look here, now; I want to know something.” And he bent over and gazed into Miss Pam’s pale little dancing eyes.
“I am quite at your service,” she answered smilingly. “Her waist is twenty inches. She takes a longer skirt than you would think. She has no false teeth, and only a little stuffing in one back molar. Her size in shoes is fours.”
“Bosh! What do I care about her teeth and her shoes? I want to know—and I’ll do as much for you some day—if Miss West has any hanger-on—any lover loafing round? Of course I know she had heaps of Johnnies who admired her. But did she seem sweet on them? ‘Lookers-on see most of the game.’”
“Yes, when there is any game to see,” retorted the young lady. “In this case there was none. Or, if there was, it was double dummy.”
“No one?” he said incredulously.
“No one,” she answered. “She talks like an old grandmother, who has been through every phase of life; talks in the abstract, of course. She has never, as far as I know, and in the language of romance, ‘smiled on any suitor.’”