"Good!"
"But it isn't so very easy," she repeated, pretending to rearrange the dahlia in her laces, so as to find a pretext for not looking him in the eyes. "It isn't so very easy; and if—later on—in after years perhaps—when everything is long over—it ever strikes you that I didn't play fair—it'll be because I played so fair that I laid myself open to that imputation. One can, you know. I only ask you to remember it. That's all."
Ashley was bewildered. He could follow little more than half of what she said. "More mysteries," he was sighing to himself as she spoke. "And such a color! That's her strong point. Pity it only comes by fits and flashes. But, good Lord, what a country! Always something queer and new."
"Good-by," she said, offering her hand before he had time to emerge from his meditations. "We shall see you to-morrow evening. And, by the way, we dine at half-past seven. We're country people here, and primitive. No; don't come to the gate. Olivia must be wondering where you are."
He looked after her as she tripped over the lawn toward the roadway, still holding her long-handled, beribboned, eighteenth-century sunshade with the daintiness of a Watteau shepherdess holding a crook.
"She's a good 'un," he said to himself. "Straight as a die, she is—and true as steel."
None the less he was glad when she left him.
XVI
