“Ah!” she smiled. “I knew you thought me atrocious from the first. You find MYRIADS of objections to me, don’t you?”
I had forgotten to look away from her eyes, and I kept on forgetting. (The same thing had happened several times lately; and each time, by a somewhat painful coincidence, I remembered my age at precisely the instant I remembered to look away.) “Dazzling” is a good old-fashioned word for eyes like hers; at least it might define their effect on me.
“If I did manage to object to you,” I said slowly, “it would be a good thing for me—wouldn’t it?”
“Oh, I’ve WON!” she cried.
“Won?” I echoed.
“Yes. I laid a wager with myself that I’d have a pretty speech from you before I went out of your life”—she checked a laugh, and concluded thrillingly—“forever! I leave Quesnay to-morrow!”
“Your father has returned from America?”
“Oh dear, no,” she murmured. “I’ll be quite at the world’s mercy. I must go up to Paris and retire from public life until he does come. I shall take the vows—in some obscure but respectable pension.”
“You can’t endure the life at the chateau any longer?”
“It won’t endure ME any longer. If I shouldn’t go to-morrow I’d be put out, I think—after to-night!”