“And me, I suppose, a cross-tempered, empty-headed country hoyden, who thinks of nothing but dogs and stables?” But she laughed as she bent to Le Sage, looking mockingly into his smiling eyes. “M. le Baron, what a character!”
“It is not of my giving,” he said. “A spirited Diana should have been my antithesis.”
“But why should you contrast us at all? Frank and I are not going to live together.”
“You are bearing in mind, I hope,” he said, “that I promised your father to be back at Wildshott by half-past two?”
“For chess again? What can you find in it?” She pulled up the pony, and, halting in the road, determinedly faced her companion. “Do you know you never answer anything that’s asked of you? Why don’t you?”
“I didn’t know I didn’t.”
“Don’t fib, sir.”
He chuckled aloud. “You are a frank young lady.” He took her slim left hand between his cushiony palms, and patted it paternally. “When a suspected man is arrested, my dear, the first warning he receives from the police is that anything he says may be used in evidence against him. Supposing we apply that rule to common converse? Then at least we shall avoid self-committal.”
“But are we all, every one of us, suspected people?”
“One never knows what may lie in a question. For instance, you ask me what can I find in chess. Very seeming innocent; but, O, the suspicion it may embody!”