"Now, Florence," said Uncle Joseph, "tell us what you were saying about how Herbert knows he has such 'pretty eyes'."
Then it seemed to Herbert that a miracle befell. Florence looked up, smiling modestly. "Oh, it wasn't anything, Uncle Joseph," she said. "I was Just trying to tease Herbert any way I could think of."
"Oh, was that all?" A hopeful light faded out of Uncle Joseph's large and inexpressive face. "I thought perhaps you'd detected him in some indiscretion."
Florence laughed, "I was just teasin' him. It wasn't anything, Uncle Joseph."
Hereupon, Herbert resumed a confused breathing. Dazed, he remained uneasy, profoundly so: and gratitude was no part of his emotion. He well understood that in conflicts such as these Florence was never susceptible to impulses of compassion; in fact, if there was warfare between them, experience had taught him to be wariest when she seemed kindest. He moved away from her, and went into another room where his condition was one of increasing mental discomfort, though he looked over the pictures in his great-uncle's copy of "Paradise Lost." These illustrations, by M. Gustave Doré, failed to aid in reassuring his troubled mind.
When Florence left the house, he impulsively accompanied her, maintaining a nervous silence as they walked the short distance between Uncle Joseph's front gate and her own. There, however, he spoke.
"Look here! You don't haf to go and believe everything that ole girl told you, do you?"
"No," said Florence heartily. "I don't haf to."
"Well, look here," he urged, helpless but to repeat. "You don't haf to believe whatever it was she went and told you, do you?"
"What was it you think she told me, Herbert?"