"Can't deny the paraffin-smell on his jacket, if it was he," retorted Dick Holiday, with a resigned shrug of his flannelled shoulders. Then he turned to Muriel. I suppose it wasn't in masculine human nature to resist saying what he did to her.
"Perhaps you'll believe me now when I say a German is—always a German? You see why I told you you weren't to speak to 'em?"
A sudden change came over Muriel's face. I suppose there isn't a girl alive who likes being shown, before a little crowd of people, that she is in the wrong. Muriel, I remembered from our Berlin days, hated it more than most people. By chance I caught her eye as her cousin spoke.
That tiny thing seemed like a lighted match in corn stalks as dry as those which had just been blazing.
For now Muriel blazed up. Temper flashed from the big eyes she turned upon her cousin.
"I don't think I'm letting you 'tell' me what I am or am not to do, Dick, thank you," she informed him with a high-pitched little laugh. "I don't take that, even from——"
Here she looked straight at me for a change.
"I don't take orders, even from the man I am going to marry. And, by the way, I don't think you have heard the news yet. I am engaged to be married, you know."
She paused for a moment, lifted her neat little head, still looking hard at me. In her pretty eyes I saw, with surprise, the expression of the woman who wants to scratch somebody; wants to hurt.
She announced, "I am writing today to promise to marry Captain Markham!"