In the same breath she added shamefacedly, "How did you know, Leslie? You are clever!" And then, in a soft burst of confidence, "Oh, I have been so worrying! All these days and days, Leslie! And to-day I felt I simply had to tell you about it—or burst! I haven't really been able to think of anything but him. And he—he hates me, I know."
She used that word to console herself. Hate is so infinitely less discouraging than polite indifference!
Leslie glanced very kindly at the flushed face, at the compact yet lissom little body sitting up on its heels on the Club lawn. She asked, "Doesn't the creature look at you? The other day when he took you out and broke down the motor? Didn't he then?"
"Yes, he did," admitted Gwenna, "a little."
"That's a start, then. So 'Cheer up, Taff, don't let your spirits go down,'" hummed Leslie. "Ask your Fräulein at the works if she knows an excellent slang German phrase for falling in love. 'Der hat sich aber man ordentlich verguckt?' 'He's been and looked himself well into it'—I am glad the Dampier boy did look. It is engendered in the eyes, as poor old Bernard Shaw used to say. It will be all right."
"Will it, d'you think? Will it?"
Gwenna, kneeling beside the dishevelled, graceful figure with its long limbs stretched out far beyond the deck-chair, gazed up as if into the face of an oracle.
"What do I do," she persisted innocently, "to make him look—to make him like me?"
"You don't 'do.' You 'be,' and pretty hard too. You, my child, sit tight. It's what they call the Passive Rôle of Woman," explained Leslie, with a twinkle. "Like this." And she drew out of her darning-basket a slender horseshoe-shaped implement such as workwomen use to pick up a dropped needle, painted scarlet to within half an inch of its end. She held it motionless a little away from her darning. There was a flash in the sunlight and a sharp little "click" as the needle flew up and clung to the magnet.
"D'you see, Turtle-dove?"