“You don’t mean to tell me you think it true, Dade?”
Dade ceased to rock. She looked at Emily with her black eyes sparkling through their long lashes, and then she squeezed her wrists between her knees and said:
“Emily Harkness, you’re in love with that man!”
Emily’s gaze fell. She thrust out her lower lip a little, and gave an almost imperceptible toss to her brown head. She stroked a silken pillow at her side. Dade’s eyes continued to sparkle at her through their long lashes, and she felt the conviction of their gaze.
“Well,” she said at last, gently, “I am going to marry him.”
Dade continued to gaze a moment longer, and then she swooped over to the divan. She hugged Emily in her strong young arms, almost squeezing the breath from the girl’s body.
“Bless you, I knew it!” And then she kissed her, but suddenly held her away at arm’s length as if she were a child, and said with the note of reproach that her claim as a life-long intimate gave her voice: “But why didn’t you tell me?”
“You’re the first I’ve told except papa,” said Emily.
“C’est vrai?” said Dade, her jealousy appeased. “Then it’s all right, dyah—and it’s splendid, I think. He’s a typical American, you know, and the very man you ought to marry. Mamma’s been afraid I’d marry one of those foreignehs, and so have I—but it’s splendid. And I tell you—” she settled herself for confidences—“I’ll come back from anywheah to the wedding, to be your maid of honah—just as we used to plan—don’t you know? Oh, I am so glad, and I think it’s noble in you; it’s just like you. It’ll elect him, too, if you announce it right away. I say, I’ll give a luncheon for you, and we can announce it then—no, that wouldn’t be correct, would it? We’d have to have the luncheon hyah—but it’ll elect him. It would in England, where the women go in for politics more than you do, n’est ce pas?”
She always spoke of her own land from the detached standpoint a long residence abroad, and sometimes a short one, gives to expatriates.