"Why not?" I smiled at him in a friendly way.
He amused me, now. I was rather tickled to see him not quite knowing how to talk to me after this silence of months in which he'd left me without a good-bye.
I saw him like a precocious schoolboy who has been rude to somebody and who wants to apologize without losing his dignity.
And, as I say, I used to see him as the most wonderful, the cleverest mixture of a man of the world and a demigod!
To think how we can change.... But he imagined I was still the adoring conquest of those old days in town.
He thought I was putting up a gallant little bit of feminine bluff. He imagined that my heart was still beating as wildly as ever it did at the sound of his voice, the glance of his eyes that courted and caressed.
Gone was their magic for me! Harry Markham didn't realize that.
That want of perception helped him towards one of the biggest mistakes he was ever to make!
I, who thought I could read every sign of his handsome, rather self-conscious young face, I'd never foreseen it.
No, not even when he began by lowering his voice to its most persuasive pitch.