“That isn't it,” she explained. “You said——”
“I said I'd take you for whatever you wanted me to. Isn't that all right?”
“It would all depend, wouldn't it?”
“Of course it would depend on what you wanted.”
“Oh, no!” she laughed. “It might depend on a lot of things.”
“Such as?”
“Well——” She hesitated, having the mischievous impulse to say, “Such as Mildred!” But she decided to omit this reference, and became serious, remembering Russell's service to her at Mildred's house. “Speaking of what I want to be taken for,” she said;—“I've been wondering ever since the other night what you did take me for! You must have taken me for the sister of a professional gambler, I'm afraid!”
Russell's look of kindness was the truth about him, she was to discover; and he reassured her now by the promptness of his friendly chuckle. “Then your young brother told you where I found him, did he? I kept my face straight at the time, but I laughed afterward—to myself. It struck me as original, to say the least: his amusing himself with those darkies.”
“Walter IS original,” Alice said; and, having adopted this new view of her brother's eccentricities, she impulsively went on to make it more plausible. “He's a very odd boy, and I was afraid you'd misunderstand. He tells wonderful 'darky stories,' and he'll do anything to draw coloured people out and make them talk; and that's what he was doing at Mildred's when you found him for me—he says he wins their confidence by playing dice with them. In the family we think he'll probably write about them some day. He's rather literary.”
“Are you?” Russell asked, smiling.