“S-sorry you don’t like my hair——”
“Not like it?” He pressed his cheek to it. “Not all that lovely soft stuff that I always wanted to touch?—and mightn’t—not even that time after it came loose in the water—”
“Looking horrid!”
—“and clung all down you! D’you know what I shall do to it, presently?”
I didn’t speak; I shut my eyes against his shoulder, and sighed.... And I had once thought I was not the “falling-in-love-type” of girl! I had once called him “that frozen ogre!”
“I shall twist this hair of yours into a great rope of black silk,” he said, “and haul you off by it to that cave! Only question is, how soon? Nancy! How soon?”
“A cave?” I said, half hearing, with my mouth against the cloth of his sleeve, “what d’you mean?”
“Why, the sort of cave with a rose-garden to it, and perhaps a little white wicket-gate at the top of the stairs—don’t you remember?”
But we’d certainly forgotten the author of that long-ago contretemps at the breakfast-table of The Lawn, the elderly enfant terrible of that age-old week-end! Our heads were close together over the date-ticket that the head of the firm had grabbed from his desk to reckon up “how soon it could possibly be,” my finger with the ring on it was caught between his lips, when the briefest of taps at the door was followed by the most sudden of entrances—by Uncle Albert Waters.