“They fade early.”
She leaned closer to him. “Before the fading have you—have you loved—many?”
“All the pretty ones I ever saw,” he answered gayly, but with something in his tone (as there was in hers) which implied that all the time they were really talking of things other than those spoken. Yet here this secret subject seemed to come near the surface.
She let him hear a genuine little snap of her teeth. “I thought you were like that!”
He laughed. “Ah, but you were sure to see it!”
“You could ‘a’ seen a Neapolitan woman yesterday, Cora,” said Hedrick, obligingly, “if you’d looked out the front window. She was working a hurdy-gurdy up and down this neighbourhood all afternoon.” He turned genially to face his sister, and added: “Ray Vilas used to say there were lots of pretty girls in Lexington.”
Cora sprang to her feet. “You’re not smoking,” she said to Corliss hurriedly, as upon a sudden discovery. “Let me get you some matches.”
She had entered the house before he could protest, and Hedrick, looking down the hall, was acutely aware that she dived desperately into the library. But, however tragic the cry for justice she uttered there, it certainly was not prolonged; and the almost instantaneous quickness of her reappearance upon the porch, with matches in her hand, made this one of the occasions when her brother had to admit that in her own line Cora was a miracle.
“So thoughtless of me,” she said cheerfully, resuming her seat. She dropped the matches into Mr. Corliss’s hand with a fleeting touch of her finger-tips upon his palm. “Of course you wanted to smoke. I can’t think why I didn’t realize it before. I must have——”
A voice called from within, commanding in no, uncertain tones.